Starcat: An Architecture for Autonomous Adaptive Behavior

Joseph Lewis and Jamie Lawson

lewis@cs.sdsu.edu San Diego State University, Department of Computer Science jamie.lawson@bbn.com BBN Technologies, Decision and Security Technologies Department
San Diego, CA

Abstract
We present Starcat, an architecture for open-ended cognitive systems that autonomously adapt their behavior to continuously changing environments. This architecture has its roots in a biologically inspired, complex adaptive systems view of cognition, the principles of which are described. Furthermore, recent ideas about the nature of autonomous behavior inform its design, resulting in a system whose ongoing coupling with its environment drives its evolution toward new behaviors.

(the Kleene closure over such systems) and acknowledges its more general nature. While its predecessors were designed for adaptive solutions to specific problems, Starcat is an open-ended architecture for computational systems that autonomously adapt their behavior to continuously changing environments. It is a framework for creating an instance of an adaptive system for a particular problem, which can then evolve beyond its initial specification.

Introduction
Evolutionary computation (EC) has become routine in solving a wide variety of problems. Genetic algorithms (Holland 1992), genetic programming (Koza 1991), learning classifier systems (Lanzi, Stoltzman and Wilson 2000), and artificial immune systems (Segel and Cohen 2000) are among the research areas on the frontier, both in theoretical development and real-world applications. As these approaches specifically address the act of discovery and the production of novelty, investigation of their utility as tools for generating autonomy follows naturally. The study of complex adaptive systems (CAS) has also advanced considerably in concert with the development of these biologically inspired techniques. Among the insights thereby gained are the importance of embodiment and coupling to the environment (Clark 1997, Kirsh 1995), the relevance of structure formation in nonlinear dynamical systems (Prigogine and Stengers 1984) and its connection with information storage and representation (Holland 1998, Steels 1995), along with the ubiquity of high-level behavior that emerges out of simple interactions amongst components with no global information (Holland 1998). Some research has focused specifically on the synthesis of these three notions from CAS research (Maturana and Varela 1980). There have also been certain computational systems that implement these ideas, such as DUAL (Kokinov 1994), Copycat (Mitchell 1993), and Madcat (Lewis and Luger 2000, Lewis 2001). Two important limitations of these systems include their inability to adapt to novel situations and their lack of true autonomy. Indeed, this lack of autonomy has kept agent-based systems from fulfilling their promise as well. The Starcat project descends from the "*-cat" family of adaptive computational systems and brings together ideas from the CAS and EC approaches with recent ideas about the nature of autonomous behavior (Kauffman 2000, Steels 1996, McGonigle 1998). Its name derives from its heritage

Autonomy, Adaptation, and Agents

The immediate goal of the Starcat architecture is the generalization of the adaptive computational architecture first implemented in a program called Jumbo (Michalski, Carbonell and Mitchell 1983) and more completely specified a decade later in Copycat. These programs demonstrated the power of certain assumptions about intelligent behavior that have since been reinforced by CAS research, as discussed below. The secondary goal of the Starcat architecture is to remedy the absence in these systems of novel adaptation. The goal is to imbue them with the ability to discover new behaviors and new relationships in their environmentsand it is here that EC research plays a role. Finally, in meeting these goals Starcat also posits a refined notion of autonomy. So it is here, in addition to being a novel architecture for autonomous adaptation to a changing environment, that Starcat offers great potential for those computational endeavors that depend on the possibility of autonomous behavior. This includes, notably, the agent-based computing community. A bedrock principle of agent-based computing is that the agents are somehow autonomous. Yet there are few cases where these agents are autonomous in anything near the sense that we expect living things to be autonomous. Most often they are simple automatons that follow a program of search-report-die. The lack of true autonomy tends to drive these systems to equilibrium too early, and this has dampened the successes of agent-based endeavors in open-ended work. It has been said that when a complex adaptive system reaches equilibrium, it is dead! So if we can extend the level of achievable autonomy in artificial systems, we will have achieved something remarkable, a liveness of sorts that will extend the range of open-ended computational systems. Specific applications that will directly benefit from this level of autonomy include, for example, autonomous

robots that can go places where humans cant goeither because the environment is too dangerous or too confined, or lacks life supports. This concept of placing systems where humans cant go extends to very different types of applications where human-like cognition or autonomy is needed but humans don't fitfor example, in information networks where the system can autonomously adapt to look for new worms and viruses or to discover chinks in the adversary's armor.

Principles of Starcats Design

Starcat is based on a novel model of cognition derived from a set of biologically inspired assumptions about the way that cognition occurs. Our assumptions include the following. A complex adaptive systems view of cognition: The goal of any truly intelligent system is not to win at games, or compute indefinite integrals, but to produce behavior. Whether or not that behavior is useful is a matter of perspective. In order for humans to drive the system toward behavior they think is useful, they need to organize the coupling between the system and the environment so that useful behaviors are associated with attractors, and the system is drawn into the basins of behavioral attraction. As an example, the model child is a behavioral attractor. There probably is no model child because thats a singular ideal and children are intelligent systems with their own unique ideas about the world. But there are conditionslike good nutrition and schools with enthusiastic teachersthat draw children closer to that ideal. Those conditions are the basin of attraction around the model child attractor. Intelligent computational systems respond to the same kinds of behavioral attractors. Emergence: Complex intelligent behavior in the world results from the simple interaction of subsystems that are each sensitive only to some small part of the world. A structural approach to achieving cognition: Cognition happens more by building structure than by processing rules. One way to interpret this is that chemistry has more to do with cognition than logic does, and this has a direct analog in information science. Partial, sufficient representation: As a consequence of the structural view, representation no longer occupies a central role in cognition. However, we also quarrel with the postulate (Brooks 1991) that representation merely gets in the way of intelligence and cognition. We believe that representation is an important byproduct of cognition, and not a precondition for it. Also, these representations are specific to the context in which they were formed. The same system, in another setting, might produce very different representations of the same concepts, and these different representations might even contradict one another. But our representation is partialjust enough to provide effective behavior within the current settingso there is no need for internal or global consistency.

Modern ideas about intelligence: The vast majority of intelligent behavior we see in nature comes not from deductive reasoning or any such logical processes, but from the ability to make good decisions in the face of information that is simultaneously vast, incomplete, and contradictory. Good decisions are those that give the creature opportunity to continue behaving and hence make other decisions. Multiple competing explanations of the world: Cognition is not about a single path of reasoning that leads to a single conclusion, but about multiple competing alternative explanations. While in the most trivial situations one explanation quickly comes to dominate the rest, in more interesting settings multiple explanations remain in play even while a response action is decided on. A greater role for high-level perception: One of the most powerful factors in cognition is what is sometimes called free associationwe call it fluid analogy making (Hofstadter 1995). This allows competing concepts to interact with one another in a situation-dependent way. Fluid analogy making is a form of high-level perception wherein we see different things as the same through some abstract lens. This really means that the structures associated with the things overlap, or share similarities, and a big part of Starcats job is to build these lenses. The first six of these assumptions enlarge the problem of cognition that has been studied in information science. The last assumption, importantly, provides a means to narrow the scope of the problem again by unifying some of these ideas.

Representation, Coupling, and Generalization by Evolution

Current models of cognition can be characterized by the role and importance accorded to knowledge representation. There are limitations in systems at both extremes. Traditional models of cognition are representation-based and rely on systems of symbols and logic or rules for their manipulation. The so-called Physical Symbol System Hypothesis (PSSH)the postulate that all cognitive processes can be modeled symbolicallyserves as an umbrella for all of these methods (Newell and Simon 1976). Examples are predicate calculus, frames (Minsky 1975), and semantic networks (Collins and Quillian 1969). Though some logics are more powerful than others, all of these models are relatively similar in expressiveness; they apply to similar types of problems, and have similar limitations. They tend to work well in very narrow domains or in games with well-defined rules, but they are also very brittle and hard to scale (Holland 1986). They depend on internal consistency, and lack ways to define situational boundaries that mitigate the need for global consistency. A significant amount of energy has been invested in extending these models to work in uncertain settings. This has produced some useful results, the most pertinent of which may be that this approach is unlikely to

lead to humanlike or human-competitive behavior in a general environment. Over the past decade, considerable work has been done to build cognitive models in the absence of representationat least representation as we know it. Some of the most notable work in this area of representation-free systems comes from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, and its research on adaptive robots (Brooks and Stein 1994, Brooks et. al. 1999). This work has produced some remarkable results, such as robots that can wall-follow or catch a ball, both of which require significant cognitive structure-building. But due to their fundamental reliance on this lack of knowledge representation, and on memory-free finite state automata, these systems are unlikely to learn in the way we normally think of learningthat is, they cannot pickle their experience for repeated use in similar situations. Though still nascent, research in cognitive models based on a CAS perspective has already produced many successful systems. Examples include learning classifier systems, artificial immune systems, and fluid analogy making. These systems take a more agnostic view of representation, leading to some approaches that may overcome the limitations of either representation-based or representation-free systems. Starcat falls into the category of CAS-based cognitive systems, but is distinct from other CAS-based approaches to cognition in several ways. First, it exhibits flexible coupling to the environment. We expect Starcat to produce useful behavior by controlling the shape of behavioral attractors that couple the system to its environment. We call the technology we use in this role Stochastic Grammar Networks (SGN's). SGNs add a couple important degrees of freedom to the system. The description of what is useful becomes part of the configuration definition and not part of the system definition. And from the systems perspective, it does pretty much the same thing regardless of environment, but its effects on its environment differ because of different couplings between the system and its surroundings. Second, Starcat employs the application of evolutionary computing to free association (fluid analogy making). Fluid analogy making has been applied to specific problem domains like word problems (Mitchell 1993), wall following (Lewis 2001), and image identification (Mitchell 2003), but in each of these cases, the systems were limited to the test domain. In each case, the researchers believed that it was possible to generalize, but did not offer specific guidance on how to do so. We have absorbed and participated in these experiences and believe we now know how to generalize models for fluid analogy making through evolutionary computing methods. We believe that one reason existing models of cognition are so brittle is that they predefine the goals the system is expected to achieve. The playwright and philosopher of mind and roboteer Tom Sgouros asks a poignant question: If you build a robot smart enough to do the dishes, will it also be smart enough to find them boring? (Sgouros

2002). This question is very closely coupled to the brittleness problem. We think that a system whose only reason for existence is to do some externally defined job can never be truly intelligent, and another way to describe the brittleness problem is not intelligent enough to adapt. There are several reasons why we think the behavioral attractors introduced in Starcat will be less brittle. There is an existence proof in nature. All social creatures have behavioral attractors, and the society as a whole shapes those attractors, for instance through laws and law enforcement or stories that reinforce definitions of morality. There is support from the observation that all definitions of useful behavior have similar structure. The system organizes its internal dynamics around its own needs, and the behavioral attractors merely define the corridors in which the system can produce behavior. In the case of a wall-following robot, those corridors are actual physical corridors. In the case of, say, an evidentiary link detector, those corridors exist only in the abstract behavioral space, but all of these corridors have similar internal structure in Starcat. As a result, the system can adapt to a wide variety of externally prescribed goals without modifying its internal behavior. Evolutionary methods make Starcats adaptation possible. As settings change and as the behavioral attractors change, the system needs new building blocks from which to construct effective behavior. Through evolution, Starcats behavioral building blocks are continually adjusting, to better address conditions in the environment. Starcats evolutionary model differs from conventional genetic algorithms or genetic programming in a significant way. The population in a genetic algorithm typically begins at the highest level of diversity and evolves toward a fixed point. The algorithm halts when diversity has been pressed out of the system. In biological evolution, the opposite happens. The gene pool grows more diverse with time. Occasionally that diversity collapses, but instead of calling this a stopping criteria, we call it a catastrophe! We think of ecosystems as open-ended and diversity collapse as a threat that can close the ecosystem. In fact, genetic diversity is the one thing that allows an ecosystem to endure a diversity collapse. Some part of the gene pool has the right stuff to survive. Starcat is an open-ended system, so we adopt the evolutionary model that we know from nature works in open-ended systems. We preserve and grow diversity, allowing changes in the setting to be endured. The problem, of course, with cultivating diversity is cultivating the kind of diversity that encourages adaptive survival, and then harnessing it. Hollands LCS is the other common example in the literature where this kind of open-ended evolution, based on preservation of diversity, takes place, and the LCS serves as inspiration for Starcat. In the LCS, fitness credit is not given just to the classifier that caused the fitness to be realized, but instead is apportioned amongst the classifiers whose actions led to the fitness being realized. This both cultivates and harnesses adaptive

diversity in the LCS. Holland concedes that LCSs have not been effective in problems dealing with metaphorwhat we are calling free association and fluid analogy. He points to the work that precedes Starcat (Copycat in particular) as the most promising lead for coping with free association (Holland 2003). Starcat uses an evolutionary model similar to the LCS to build structures similar to those in Copycat, except with a much greater ability to adapt to changes in surroundings.

Research Issues
Several questions have been raised in the evolution of Starcats design. Five of these are discussed here. How well can behavior be generalized? What kind of performance will such a system obtain? Can we be sure such a system will not get stuck? What are the issues around the diversity of the evolutionary process? How do we specify the behavior toward which it should tend? Generalizability: There are a couple of structures (the slipnet, or concept network and the codelets, or executable primitives) in existing fluid analogy makers that have resisted generalization. We think that our selection of evolutionary computing methods will overcome this limitation, providing generalization. It will require experimentation in multiple domains to prove this. Performance: We cannot predict the performance of our system. Though high performance is at best a secondary objective at this point, we are aware that some complex adaptive systems, humans for example, take a long time in learning to adapt to their environments; other systems, like whales, learn to adapt very quickly (Williamson 1996). While we do not anticipate that Starcat will initially have performance comparable to systems dedicated to particular problems, we expect it to be fast enough to measure resultsto measure the levels of organization the system achieves. Progression and looping: In optimization algorithms, the goal is to find the extrema as soon as possible and then halt. But in an open-ended system like Starcat, the goal is to continue producing behavior indefinitely, and one risk is that when we find the bottom of the basin of attraction, there will be no incentive to produce further behavior, or that the system will continue to produce a lot of behavior as it spirals perpetually toward the basin of attraction, but that this behavior has insufficient impact on the environment to draw the system towards other basins of behavioral attraction. This is analogous to the analysis/paralysis loop that humans are sometimes drawn into. Diversity Collapse: Starcat may be vulnerable to the same kinds of diversity collapse that threaten ecosystems, and diversity collapse in such a system is analogous to brittleness in PSSH systems. Diversity collapse is caused by changes in the environmentoperations that once produced effective structures that pushed the system toward basins of attraction but no longer do. Another way

to describe this is that the system loses confidence in the way it perceives its surroundings, and in order to keep producing behavior it needs to find new models of perception. This means that we will need to invest enough diversity in the system to adapt to environmental fluctuations. We expect this problem to be particularly acute during early stages of evolution, where diversity is still rapidly expanding. Behavioral Attractor Specification: One conspicuous difficulty with developing systems like Madcat and Copycat is that domain behavior of the system is tuned (its attractors are specified and adjusted) only through the modulation of the relative numbers of executable primitives of different type (Lewis 2001). This means tuning is done in terms of implementation concepts rather than domain concepts. This fact also belies an inherent inefficiency in how one of the primary system components is utilized (the coderack). To address these difficulties, the Stochastic Grammar Networks are being developed. These specify probabilistic replacement rules for sequences of tokens (replacing the instances of executable primitives). These rules are distributed over interacting objects that take the place of the coderack in its earlier form. Tokens must be built up both locally and in a distributed fashion across connected objects by the firing of rules. This generates a similar sequence of primitive executions that the populations of primitives did before. The rules and probabilities in the grammar, which define the goal behaviors for the system, can be adjusted with less coupling to the implementation details.

Conclusion
Complex adaptive systems research indicates several ideas that are relevant for intelligent behavior. First, structurebuilding is more important than symbolic logic. Second, knowledge representation is partial, multiplicitous, and used only as needed. Third, solving problems is not really the point of intelligence; rather, it is the production of behavior and decision-making that matter. Finally, highlevel perception (involving the fluid commingling of multiple perceptions and inductive biases) is key to intelligent behavior. These ideas are united in the Starcat architecture to provide a superior model of autonomous agency and a framework for adaptive systems that can be informed of the environment in which they are to operate and the goals they are expected to have and then amplify those goals through interaction with and discovery in their environment. This work is currently under review for funding from DARPA.

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