Marvin Minsky

We are developing a theory about the architecture of commonsense thinking. The design is described most fully in Marvin Minsky's forth- coming book The Emotion Machine, a sequel to The Society of Mind. One view of the architecture's design is shown in the figure below, which emphasizes how the processes that produce commonsense thinking are organized into reflective layers.

Rather than seeking a best way to organize agents, this architecture supports multiple 'ways to think', each a different architectural con- figuration of agents. Each agent may use a different way to repre- sent and reason with knowledge, and there are special 'panalogy' mechanisms that link agents that represent similar ideas in different ways. Our goal is to build an AI system resourceful enough to com- bine the advantages of many different ways to think about things, by making use of many types of mechanisms for reasoning, repre- sentation, and reflection.

Publications

• Singh, Push: EM-ONE: An Architecture for Reflective Commonsense Thinking. 2005 [PDF]
• Minsky, Marvin: The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1988
• Minsky, Marvin: Drafts of The Emotion Machine.