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A basic agent
Abstract
A basic agent has been constructed which integrates limited natural language understanding and generation, temporal planning and reasoning, plan execution, simulated symbolic perception, episodic memory, and some general world knowledge. The agent is cast as a robot submarine operating in a two‐dimensional simulated “Seaworld” about which it has only partial knowledge. It can communicate with people in a vocabulary of about 800 common English words using a medium coverage grammar. The agent maintains an episodic memory of events in its life and has a limited ability to reflect on those events. A person can make statements to the agent, ask it questions, and give it commands. In response to commands, a temporal task planner is invoked to synthesize a plan, which is then executed at an appropriate future time. A large variety of temporal references in natural language are interpreted with respect to agent time. The agent can form and retain compound future plans, and replan in response to new information or new commands. Natural language verbs are represented in a state transition semantics for compatibility with the planner. The agent is able to give terse answers to questions about its past experiences, present activities and perceptions, future intentions, and general knowledge. No other artificial intelligence artifact with this range of capabilities has previously been constructed.
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“Furthermore, non-parametric episodic memory plays a pivotal role in shaping AI systems' behavioral strategies [185, 186, 187, 143, 188].”
From Human-inspired Perspectives: A Survey on AI Long-term Memory (2024) · cites this paper as [185]
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Intelligent agents: theory and practice
Wooldridge, M., & Jennings, N. R. (1995) · The Knowledge Engineering Review · doi:10.1017/s0269888900008122 · Cited by 6,810
Enhancing intelligent agents with episodic memory
Nuxoll, A. M., & Laird, J. E. (2012) · Cognitive Systems Research · doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2011.10.002 · Cited by 99
Human-inspired Perspectives: A Survey on AI Long-term Memory
He, Z., Lin, W., Zheng, H., Zhang, F., Jones, M. W., Aitchison, L., Xu, X., Liu, M., Kristensson, P. O., & Shen, J. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.00489 · Cited by 3
“Furthermore, non-parametric episodic memory plays a pivotal role in shaping AI systems’ behavioral strategies [179, 180, 181, 137, 182].”
Metadata
- Authors
- Vere, S., & Bickmore, T.
- Affiliations
- Lockheed (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Bickmore, Timothy
- Venue
- Computational Intelligence
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1990-02
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 41-60
- ISSN
- 0824-7935 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8640
- OpenAlex
- W2155538387
- Cited by
- 165
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2021: 1 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 18.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Computational Intelligence (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
- Keywords
- natural language understanding, natural language generation, temporal planning, temporal reasoning, plan execution, episodic memory, symbolic perception, world knowledge, temporal reference, replanning, question answering
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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- Vere, S., & Bickmore, T. (1990). A basic agent. Computational Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.1990.tb00128.x
