Pfeifer, R. (1996) Building
"Fungus Eaters":
Design Principles of Autonomous Agents. In Animals to Animats,
Volume 4 (SAB96),
eds. Maes, Mataric, Meyer, Pollack, Wilson. MIT Press. 3-12.
When reading this paper, it may help to consider these questions:
Can the design principles be ranked in terms of their importance for
building
autonomous robots: what is/are the most fundamental for adaptive
behaviour?
Do you agree with all of the principles? On what evidence are they
based? As scientists, could we design experiments to find out if they
are correct? Do you think further principles should be added to the
list?
What's the difference (if any) between an explanation or description of nature, and a design principle?
Does Pfeifer's approach potentially give insight to study of human cognition? In other words, can this type of approach scale up from relatively simple to more complex cognition?