Icarus - Argus & Meander (Langly, P.)
Capabilities
Argus and Meander are Icarus' interfaces to the external world. Agrus
is the perception module, while Meander is the effector module. Argus has the
ability to notice qualitative breaks in the subset of the environment it is
paying attention to, thereby allowing it to produce a qualitative event to
pass to Labrynth. Argus monitors the plan in
active memoryto determine
what to pay attention to. Both parsing the environment and
selective attention
are able to increase the efficiency with which Icarus can deal with its
environment and both become increasingly important as the architecture is
scaled up to more complex environments. The attention mechanism used in Argus
however limits the
reactivity of the architecture by limiting the environment
to those features that seem relevant, not all of those that necessarialy are
relavent.
Since all problems and plans consist of qualitative states, Meander
must be able to effect a qualitative state. This means that it must have the
ability to produce an action, in a given direction, for a specified period
of time. It produces these actions according to the plan constructed
in active memory by Daedalus, and has the ability to begin
executing partially completed plans if the
backtracking probability learned by Labrynth is
sufficiently low.