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The Dynamics of Growing Symbols: A Ludics Approach to Language Design by Autonomous Agents

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Artificial General Intelligence (AGI 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12177))

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Abstract

Even with the relative ascendancy of sub-symbolic approaches to AI, the symbol grounding problem presents an ongoing challenge to work in artificial general intelligence. Prevailing ontology design practices typically presuppose the transparency of the relation between semantics and syntax by transcendently stipulating it extrinsic to the system, rather than providing a platform for the internal development of this relation through agents’ interactions endogenous to the system. Drawing on theoretical resources from ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, and interactive computation, this work suggests an inversion of the symbol grounding problem in order to analyze how the symbolic regime can emerge out of causally embedded dynamical interactions within a system of autonomous intelligent agents. Under this view, syntactic-symbols come to be stabilized from other signs as constraints harnessing the dynamics of agents’ inter-actions, where the functional effects generated by such constrained dynamics give rise to an internal characterization of semantics broadly aligned with Brandom’s semantic pragmatism. Finally, ludics—a protological framework based on interactive computation—provides a formal model to concretely describe this continuity between syntax and semantics arising within and through the regulative dynamics of interactions in a multi-agent system. Accordingly, this bottom-up approach to grounding the symbolic order in dynamics could provide the conditions for artificial agents to engage in autonomous language design, thus equipping themselves with a powerful cognitive technology for intersubjective coordination and (re)structuring ontologies within a community of agents.

“Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs” [1].

S. Bougsty-Marshall—Independent Scholar.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Even as this sketch is admittedly preliminary, signposts toward developing an agent-based simulation that performs this process can be seen in works by Terui [20] describing a computational term syntax for designs and Fouqueré [21] devising a web-based programming language to model interactive dialogue between server and client.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Berlin, Germany

    Skye Bougsty-Marshall

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  1. Skye Bougsty-Marshall
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. SingularityNET Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ben Goertzel

  2. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Russia

    Aleksandr I. Panov

  3. SingularityNET Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Alexey Potapov

  4. University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Roman Yampolskiy

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Bougsty-Marshall, S. (2020). The Dynamics of Growing Symbols: A Ludics Approach to Language Design by Autonomous Agents. In: Goertzel, B., Panov, A., Potapov, A., Yampolskiy, R. (eds) Artificial General Intelligence. AGI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12177. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52152-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52152-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52151-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52152-3

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