Last Modified 5
October 2005
Simulations aren't evil
In the old days of `New AI', one of the
things that helped define the field was the claim that simulations were
evil,
and that true AI could only be achieved on robots.
Why? Two reasons:
- Real intelligence isn't as complex as it looks. The
apparent
complexity of behavior is a reflection of the complexity of the natural
environment in which the behavior is expressed. If you take
away nature and construct a simple environment, then you will either
wind up putting
too much complexity in your agent or you will fail to make it look very
smart.
- In most of engineering, the hardest part of solving a problem is
understanding it. If you build a simulation, then you are
claiming you understand
the problem well enough to replicate that problem. Naturally you
will
be able to solve the problem you've created yourself! Simulations
allow
you to either deliberately or accidentally over-simplify the problems
of real
intelligence.
So if I know all that, why don't I think simulations are evil?
Well, basically, I've realized two more things:
- Nobody builds their own simulations anymore. `Simulations'
are
often real problem environments that are developed by a large number of
people,
like the robocup simulation
league or unreal
tournament. So no one can cheat; these are real problems.
- Robots are also simulations. They don't have anything like
the
sensing or actuation of real animals, and they seldom run in realistic
environments. Arguably, a software agent that has to swim
in a fluid dynamics simulation with simulated vision may be more like a
real animal than a robot with wheels and a laser range finder.
I've learned a lot from working with robots (and I probably wouldn't
have developed BOD without having worked on
one robot platform for a year
and a half). But one of the things I learned was not to be a
robot
snob.
I talk about what I learned from robots more in my PhD
dissertation, and why they aren't critical to AI more in a paper
called "Hypothesis
Testing for Complex Agents". Both of these are available on
my publications
page.
page author: Joanna Bryson
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