12 May ’08
Task 1: associating food with foodsources
With the memory and the world in place, it is time to subject one craa to its first task: to learn in a field of objects that tree-objects and food-objects are associated (i.e., in their world food lies always adjacent to a tree, and poisonous plants always grow near rocks). The animal is not steering itself yet, but is forced in a random forward walk, and biting whatever it encounters.
It works! Given the world (part of it) pasted below, and the craa (@) wandering a 1000 steps, it has clearly associated (f)ood with (T)rees and (p)oison with (R)ocks. Not only that, but in this randomly created world. (N)eutral objects happen to be a lying close to food as well, and are associated as such. The references to (bite X) in the associative memories are actions of the craa it self, which also get added to the short-term memory as they occur, but this will only be interesting in the future, when craas have multiple actions to chose from.
. . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . p R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. T f . . . . . . f T . . . . R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . f . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . . . T f . p . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R p . .
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N . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . N N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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. . . . . T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . N . f . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p R p .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . f . . . . . . . . . . . . . p N . .
. . . . . T . . . . N . . . . . . . T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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. . . . . . . . . . f T . . . . . . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . T
. . . . . . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . . .
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N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . N . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . f . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . @ . R . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . f . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The settings in this simulation were: 1000 timesteps, world of 40x40, short-term memory size of 7, long-term memory size of 50, 3 associations made each time an observation is transferred from short to long-term memory.
short-term memory:
(T f N f T f f)
associative longterm memory:
N iaw . N, 4 R, 20 T, 25 f, . p, 1 (bite N), . (bite R), . (bite T), . (bite f), . (bite p),
R iaw 16 N, . R, 10 T, 2 f, 20 p, 1 (bite N), . (bite R), . (bite T), . (bite f), 1 (bite p),
T iaw 23 N, 2 R, . T, 24 f, . p, . (bite N), . (bite R), 1 (bite T), . (bite f), . (bite p),
f iaw 25 N, 1 R, 21 T, . f, . p, 1 (bite N), . (bite R), 1 (bite T), 1 (bite f), . (bite p),
p iaw 24 N, 19 R, 3 T, 4 f, . p, . (bite N), . (bite R), . (bite T), . (bite f), . (bite p),
If we want our craa to walk on its own, rather than be forced in a walk, it will need a motivation to chose a direction. It will need to be able to give an emotional positive value to food, and control its direction of walking based on the emotional value of a direction. The first attempts to implement this were to merely add these emotions as observations to the long-term memory, but this seemed to have some drawbacks (for one, if a craa had learned about poison, and would just pass by poisonous plants and avoid biting in them, the negative emotion associated with eating poisonous plants would slowly fade from its long-term memory, as it wasn't reaffirming that emotion over time anymore). A second option was to create a separate emotional longterm memory, in which positive, neutral and negative associations with certain objects or actions are stored, and this, for now, seems a more fruitful approach.
Here is the arc code:
~bOR_