Logic, Self-Awareness and Self-Improvement: The Metacognitive Loop and the Problem of Brittleness

Abstract

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able to notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. This basic strategy of self-guided learning is termed the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. This paper (a) argues that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) details the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describes specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outlines both short-term and long-term research agendas.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA437019

Entities

People

  • Donald R. Perlis
  • Michael L. Anderson

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Sensors
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Brittleness
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computers
  • Detection
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Language
  • Learning
  • Monitoring
  • Natural Languages
  • Ontologies
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Perturbations
  • Reasoning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Standards

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Strategic Security Studies

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control