The Talking Heads Experiment
Authors: Frederic Kaplan, Luc
Steels, Joris Van Looveren, Angus McIntyre
WEB site: http://talking-heads.csl.sony.fr
Continuous demonstration
Description
The Talking Heads experiment tests in how far open populations of situated cognitive robotic agents can create a universal information ecosystem by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. The agents can teleport to different physical sites in the world through the Internet. Sites in Antwerp, Paris, Tokyo, San Jose, Rio and Brussels are operational during ECAL99. Humans can interact with the agents either on site or remotely through the Internet and thus influence the evolving ontologies and languages of the artificial agents.
For the ECAL demonstration an additional physical site will be connected to the agent teleporting network (ATN). Visitors can also create their own agents and inject them into the artificial agent society.
The experiment tests theories of the origins of language and meaning and of the grounding of language in real world perception and action. The agents have been endowed with a cognitive architecture that enables them to invent their own ontologies and languages and acquire those already existing in the group. Biological principles such as self-organisation and selectionism play a major role to attain the emergence and continued evolution of this agent-based information ecosystems.
Bibliography
- Steels, L. (1999) Words and Meanings. The Talking Heads Experiment. [a pre-edition of this book will be available on demo-site]