Abstract
This paper reflects on a seminal work in the history of AI and representation: Rodney Brooks’ 1991 paper Intelligence without representation. Brooks advocated the removal of explicit representations and engineered environments from the domain of his robotic intelligence experimentation, in favour of an evolutionary-inspired approach using layers of reactive behaviour that operated independently of each other. Brooks criticised the current progress in AI research and believed that removing complex representation from AI would help address problematic areas in modelling the mind. His belief was that we should develop artificial intelligence by being guided by the evolutionary development of our own intelligence and that his approach mirrored how our own intelligence functions. Thus, the field of behaviour-based robotics emerged. This paper offers a historical analysis of Brooks’ behaviour-based robotics approach and its impact on artificial intelligence and cognitive theory at the time, as well as on modern-day approaches to AI.
Highlights
In 1991, Rodney Brooks published the paper Intelligence without representation, a seminal work on behaviour-based robotics [1]
In Intelligence without representation, Brooks described his behaviour-based robotics approach to artificial intelligence
Brooks was advocating the removal of explicit representations and engineered environments from the domain of his robotic intelligence experimentation
Summary
In 1991, Rodney Brooks published the paper Intelligence without representation, a seminal work on behaviour-based robotics [1]. He believed that traditional AI research efforts addresses the wrong type of intelligent behaviour and quoted evolutionary time scales to support this view It took 5000 years to develop the art of writing: only a tiny fraction of the 3.5 billion years it took to develop the essence of “being and reacting” [1]. Given this evolutionary precedent, Brooks believed that the proportion of research in specialised areas such as computational linguistics and natural language processing is disproportionately large and that we should instead be concentrating our efforts on modelling more simple intelligent behaviour. It is interesting to note that Brooks includes these publications in his list of publications on his academic profile [13], none of the symbolic AI papers are linked to full texts of the paper (though the full texts are accessible from other sources), whereas the vast majority of his papers post 1985 do have links
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