Abstraction

Contrasted with concept acquisition, abstraction is the ability to detect the relevant -- or critical -- information and action for a particular problem. Abstraction is often used in planning and problem solving in order to form a condition list for operators that lead from one complex state to another based on the criticality of the precondition.

For instance, in an office environment, a robot with a master key can effectively ignore doors if it knows how to open doors in general. Thus, the problem of considering doors in a larger plan may be abstracted from the problem solving. This can be performed by the agent repeatedly to obtain the most general result. Some architectures limit abstraction to avoid the problem of over-generalization, resulting in mistaken applications of the erroneously abstracted operator.

Architectures having this capability include:

Go to A List of Common Capabilities.

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