Abstract
In much work on adaptive behaviour and learning in agents, animats (Wilson 1991) or animals, environments are often described as uncertain, variable, unpredictable, dynamic, complex, and even threatening. For example, to list just a few: from Meyer and Guillot (1991) we have, “In a changing, unpredictable, and more or less threatening environment the behavior of an animal is adaptive as long as the behavior allows the animal to survive”, from Wilson (1991) we have, “Environments differ enormously in their complexity, uncertainty, and degree of reinforcement”, from Cruse (1991), “An autonomous robot which has to move in an uncertain environment has to deal with the problem of how to perform a goal-oriented behaviour”, and from Maes (1993), talking about Behavior-Based AI, we have, “. . . a general approach for building autonomous systems that have to deal with multiple, changing goals in a dynamic, unpredictable environment. ” Despite all these kinds of statements about environments, there is no clear agreement about the use of these descriptive terms. In what way or ways are environmentsuncertain orvariable, and what isunpredictable about them, ordynamic, orcomplex about them?
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Smithers, T. (2000). On Behaviour as Dissipative Structures in Agent-Environment Interaction Systems. In: Cruse, H., Dean, J., Ritter, H. (eds) Prerational Intelligence: Adaptive Behavior and Intelligent Systems Without Symbols and Logic, Volume 1, Volume 2 Prerational Intelligence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Behavior of Natural and Artificial Systems, Volume 3. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0870-9_44
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