

For First Time Robot Displays Self-Awareness in Logic Puzzle - ankitaggarwal
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/10473/Robot-Displays-Self-Awareness-in-Logic-Puzzle.aspx

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mannykannot
To an outsider like me, this looks very impressive. On looking through the
paper giving a 3-page summary of the Denotic Cognitive Event Calculus
([http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~govinn/dcec.pdf](http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~govinn/dcec.pdf)),
I got the impression that this apparent self-awareness was in some way built
into the language - for example, 'Self' appears to be a word declared in the
syntax. I don't know if this is so, or if it really matters - perhaps someone
who does could comment?

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svalorzen
I don't know whether this is impressive or not. It's not like they took three
robots, told them the puzzle and they started thinking and talking. It depends
on how they actually implemented it. With prolog it would take 30 minutes to
have something like this, given that you know the puzzle and what you want the
robots to do.

No self-awareness was there for sure, though, and I feel whatever they did
won't really traspose to anything else easily, so I don't think the result is
particularly impressive.

OTOH, the algorithm itself could be new and more performant of whatever Prolog
could do, and that would be an achievement. But not really with respect to AI.

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mannykannot
Having thought about it some more, what I think is going on here is that the
Denotic Cognitive Event Calculus formalizes the deductive steps that a
rational and already self-aware agent would perform, and the program is
therefore just 'going through the motions'. If so, then this is not like
becoming self-aware as a result of experience processed by generalized
intelligence, something that several species are capable of.

