Focused Behavior and Processing/Selective Attention
The designers of most intelligent agents intend their agents to be
operative in a complex, dynamic environments, usually the
"real
world" or some subset thereof. This, however, often causes
significant practical problems: the real world provides a literally
overwhelming amount of information
to the agent; if the agent were to
attempt to sense and process all this information, there would be very
few computational resources remaining for other processes such as planning or learning.
One way in which this problem is overcome is by incorporating some
form of focusing mechanism, whereby the agent determines what sort of
information it needs to attack the current problem. It looks for and
processes all relevant information it can, but (more or less) ignores
other extraneous data. By focusing all of its processes only on the
problem at hand, the combinatorial explosion of information from the
world can be sidestepped.
Architectures having this capability include:
Go to A List of Common Capabilities.
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Current Location: Capabilities-Focused Behavior and Processing/Selective Attention