"Glass-Box" / "Black-Box" Dichotomy

The choice between glass-box and black-box knowledge representation has a profound effect on the design of the rest of the architecture. Glass-box construction is facilitated by a uniform representation of knowledge, which in turn facilitates both learning and self reflection. This, of course, requires a fixed knowledge representation, which may constrain the design of other parts of the architecture. Black-box representations allow various portions of the architecture to maintain their own world models using their own representation scheme. This makes meta-reasoning and self-reflection more difficult to implement, but it is possible for a black-box agent to reason about its own actions under certain conditions.
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