The Nicole Project: Mission Statement
Mission Statement
The Nicole Project is about the science of building artificial people. Its goal is not
just the creation of a set of tools that could be used to build an intelligent agent,
nor is it just about the creation of such an agent itself; the true goal of
the Nicole Project is to develop a complete theory of a human-level intelligent
agent, a theory that could be used and applied to develop a wide range of agents,
regardless of the tools that are employed.
The Nicole Project has two fundamental principles. First, the best way to create a
theory of an intelligent agent is to tackle the whole probelm - attempt to build a
complete agent and then to determine what theoretical components are required to
produce its behavior, rather than focus too deeply on building individual
components. In this sense, the Nicole Project is compatible with Nilsson's
habile systems initiative and with Chandresakaran's concepts of
generic tasks.
Second, human-level intelligence is not built upon one fundamental
mechanism, but instead a broad toolkit of mechanisms, each optimized for a particular
idiosyncratic part of the human environment, which work together smoothly and
cooperatively to produce intelligent behavior. Thus, the Nicole Project is
fundamentally scruffy and modular, standing firmly in the
tradition of Minsky's Society of Mind theory, Kolodner's case-based reasoning
theory, Fodor's Modularity of Mind theory, and the theories and conjectures
of a whole host of other people who aren't normally comfortable being listed together.
The Nicole Project will have succeeded when we have:
- constructed Nicole, an autonomous agent with human-level intelligence
- successfully explained why Nicole works, and under what conditions she works.
Obviously, the Nicole Project is an on-going research effort that will probably take
(at least three) decades. Currently, the Nicole Project consists of a set of theories
about agent architectures, knowledge representation, memory, reasoning, and control,
as well as a small but growing set of tools and systems which implement those theories.
Direct academic correspondence to:
Anthony G. Francis, Jr.
AI / Cognitive-Science Group
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
Phone: (404) 853-9381, (404) 853-9372 fax
E-mail: centaur@cc.gatech.edu
For more information, try `finger'
or contact me directly via e-mail to centaur@cc.gatech.edu.
Last Modified: August 10, 1995 by Anthony Francis (centaur@cc.gatech.edu)