BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

AUTOMATON (learning) 1)5)

← Back

A type of automaton made of several subroutines able to interact

An interesting example is R.A. Brooks's "Allen" robot, described as follows by M. Pesche (2000): "Allen does not "think"about the room it occupies: it makes no effort to build a model of the room it occupies: or to understand the shapes of the objects inside"(p. 29)

"Allen is thus not programmed, i.e. no precise prescriptive instructions guide its behavior. It does not respond to the general characteristics of so-called "Artificial intelligence". Pesche writes:" Allen is built with a tight connection between its sensors, which detect the presence of nearby objects, and its affectors, which move the machine…

"…Allen does not follow a routine sequence of programming steps to generate its moves. Several modular subroutines- such as drives to avoid moving objects and to explore uncharted territories run simultaneously and independently, which causes them to interact in unpredictable ways as they respond to the environment.

"Neither of these independent modules begin operating with any knowledge about their environment, nor about how their activity affects this environment. But as the modules execute, they compete to generate some aspect of Allen's overall response to its environment"(Ibid)

This is quite similar to Rumelhart and McClelland Parallel Distributed Processing and it leads to a bottom up construction of a globally coherent behavior.

Interestingly, Pesche observes the similarity of Allen's behavior- as an automaton- with learning in children as was investigated by Jean Piaget, who described children 's play as"…an advanced experiment in the ways the world works"(p. 30)

Both ways of learning lead to behavioral autopoiesis

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint