Coding Artificial Minds

This book is about implementing an artificial mind, which is often interchangeably called a cognitive architecture, cognitive system, or cognitive model. To do so, many technical details must be filled in, while at the same time creative interstices should be preserved. This book is by no means a definitive treatise on artificial general intelligence. Rather, this book is a partial specification of the Piagetian Modeler cognitive architecture (Miller, 2011), as implemented in a specific cognitive system named GIL, the Generally Intelligent Learner. This book sketches a structuralist and constructivist cognitive architecture for an autonomous general independent learner. The learner is comprised of cognitive system design patterns operating upon a multi-typed heterarchical ontology of memory elements constituting the cognitive model. The model is automatically constructed, pruned, and manipulated by parallel mechanisms. Some of the internals of the cognitive architecture are detailed in this book. The architecture explores design pattern based developmental artificial intelligence. The goal of the architecture is to control a device such as a robot using a cognitive model built entirely from sensorimotor stimuli.