Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Synthetic psychology is a field where biological behavior is synthesized rather than analyzed. The father of such behavior Valentino Braitenberg ( home page ) did some interesting work with toy vehicles in the 1986 book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology“.

The Braitenberg vehicles were simple toy cars with light sensors as headlights. In some cars the wire for each headlight went to the real wheel directly behind it, in some the wires went to the opposite back wheel. The headlight receptors were aimed slightly off to the outside. The more light received by a receptor the faster the wheel wired to that receptor would turn.

Each vehicle exhibited realistic behavior when placed in a plane with several randomly placed light sources. A vehicle wired straight back when placed near a light source will then rush towards the light veering off as it gets closer to the light. As it gets more distant from the light sources the vehicle slows down. The reason is the wheel receiving the most light spins fastest turning the car away from the light source.

The vehicle with the crossed wires will turn and drive towards the brightest light in its field of view. The closer it gets, the faster it goes eventually running into the light.

Pretty interesting behavior from a very simple machine. But what if we add in a neurode to each wire and instead of a plain wire we use a wire that inhibits signals? Neurodes are set to only fire if they receive signals over a certain threshold. In this case zero is to be our threshold. So now our cars send signals to the wheels if there is no light, and do not send a signal if there is a light. Now the vehicle with the wires straight back moves toward a light and slows as it approaches, facing the light. The second vehicle now avoids light sources, speeding off to the darkest corner it can find.

So what has this all to do with current artificial intelligence? Some of our best stuff right now came from earlier work that was done and stopped. Some of our best mathematical algorithms come from extremely early math. And to remind you ( and me ) that simple rules can create very complex behavior in game characters and artificial life forms.

Four neurode versions of these vehicles have been built and they will exhibit more complex, non-linear behavior. “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” (Edsger Dijkstra) At what point does the behavior become realist enough to be considered a life form?

Source Code:
Java simulation of Braitenberg Vehicles

More information:
Braitenberg Vehicles ( Java and Lisp simulators here )
Another simulation and pseudocode code here

Papers:
Robotics as an educational tool ( CiteSeer )
Swarm modelling. The use of Swarm Intelligence to generate architectural form. ( pdf)