CIS718 Instructor: Dr. Kopec

Article Report by Liting Li

Book: The Society of Mind

Author: Marvin Minsky

Published by: Simon and Schuster

Year: 1986

ISBN: 0-671-60740-5

Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

--The mind and the brain--

A few centuries ago it seemed impossible to explain life, but now every living thing was

found to be composed of smaller cells, and cells turned out to be composed of complex but comprehensible chemicals.

Similarly, a century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians began to reveal the unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, When machines were made to see, reason and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950s, stimulated by the invention of modern computers.

Most people still believe that no machines could ever be conscious, or feel ambition, jealousy, humor, or have any other mental life-experience. To be sure, we are still far from being able to create machines that do all the things people do. But this only means that we need better theories about how thinking works.

--The Agents of the mind--

How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence?

To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we’d consider smart. Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that has no thoughts or feelings of their own, we’ll only have gone around on a circle.

“Society of mind” this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes.

These we’ll call “agents”.

There are many questions to answer.

Function: How do agents work?

Embodiment: What are they made of?

Interaction: How do they communicate?

Origins:Where do the first agents come from?

Heredity: Are we all born with the same agents?

Learning: How do we make new agents and change old ones?

Character: What are the most important kinds of agents?

……

Each of these questions seems difficult to answer. But once we see the mind as a society of agents, each answer will illuminate the rest.

--The society of mind—

To start to see how minds are like societies, try this: “ Pick up a cup of tea”.

Grasping agents want to keep hold of the cup.

Balancing agents want to keep the tea from spilling out.

Thirst agents want you to drink the tea.

Moving agents want to get the cup to your lips.

The agents can depend on one another. If each does its own little job, the really big job will get done by all of them together: “ drinking tea”.

We are always doing several things at once, like planing and talking and walking, and this all seems so natural. But we scarcely think about how many processes involved. Actually these processes involve more machinery than anyone can understand all at once.

So we should focus on just one ordinary activity and break its process into smaller parts, and then we’ll see how each of them relates to all the other parts.

--The world of blocks—

Imagine a child playing with blocks, and imagine that this child’s mind contains a host of smaller minds. Call them mental agents. There are a lot of agents work together and one of them in control, called “Builder”. Builder’s specialty is making towers from blocks.

Builder

Begin Add End

Find Get Put

See Grasp Move Release

Builder asks for help from several other agents, because building a tower is too complicated a job for any single agent. In fact, even to find another block and place it on the tower top is too big for a job for any single agent. So Add must call for other agents’ help, and so on …… .

Why break things into such small parts? Because minds, like towers, are made that way—except that they’re composed of processes instead of blocks.

--Common sense—

What if the tower starts to sway? A real builder must guess the cause. It is because some joint inside the column isn’t square enough? Is the foundation insecure, or is the tower too tall for its width? Perhaps it is only because the last block was placed too roughly.

All children learn about such things, but we rarely ever think about them in our later years. By the time we are adults we regard all of this to be simple “ common sense “. But these two words conceal almost countless different skills.

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is diverse and intricate. But what makes it seem so obvious and natural? This illusion of simplicity comes from losing touch with what happened during infancy, when we formed our first abilities. As each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them. As time goes on, the layers below become increasingly remote.

--Agents and Agencies—

We want to explain intelligence as a combination of simpler things that are non-intelligent. We must understand how those parts are interrelated—that is, how groups of agents can accomplish things.

If we watch Builder work, from the outside, with no idea of how it works inside, we’d have the impression that it knows how to build towers. Through this way, we call Builder

“ agency “.

But if we could see Builder from the inside, we’d surely find no knowledge there. We would see nothing more than a few switches, arranged in various ways to turn each other on and off. By this way, Builder is an agent, it cannot know anything at all.

etc.