Previously in series: Worse Than Random

A tale of two architectures...

Once upon a time there was a man named Rodney Brooks, who could justly be called the King of Scruffy Robotics. (Sample paper titles: "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control", "Intelligence Without Reason"). Brooks invented the "subsumption architecture" - robotics based on many small modules, communicating asynchronously and without a central world-model or central planning, acting by reflex, responding to interrupts. The archetypal example is the insect-inspired robot that lifts its leg higher when the leg encounters an obstacle - it doesn't model the obstacle, or plan how to go around it; it just lifts its leg higher.

In Brooks's paradigm - which he labeled nouvelle AI - intelligence emerges from "situatedness". One speaks not of an intelligent system, but rather the intelligence that emerges from the interaction of the system and the environment.

And Brooks wrote a programming language, the behavior language, to help roboticists build systems in his paradigmatic subsumption architecture - a language that includes facilities for asynchronous communication in networks of reflexive components, and programming finite state machines.

My understanding is that, while there are still people in the world who speak with reverence of Brooks's subsumption architecture, it's not used much in commercial systems on account of being nearly impossible to program.

Once you start stacking all these modules together, it becomes more and more difficult for the programmer to decide that, yes, an asynchronous local module which raises the robotic leg higher when it detects a block, and meanwhile sends asynchronous signal X to module Y, will indeed produce effective behavior as the outcome of the whole intertwined system whereby intelligence emerges from interaction with the environment...

Asynchronous parallel decentralized programs are harder to write. And it's not that they're a better, higher form of sorcery that only a few exceptional magi can use. It's more like the difference between the two business plans, "sell apples" and "sell nonapples".

One noteworthy critic of Brooks's paradigm in general, and subsumption architecture in particular, is a fellow by the name of Sebastian Thrun.

You may recall the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge for the driverless cars. How many way...

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