An AI Architecture Based on Message Passing

Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We present an AI architecture used for modeling computational rational cognitive agents--- agents that can reason, and act in an environment based on their representations of beliefs, acts, and intentions. A unified representational formalism is employed for representation of propositions (beliefs), goals (desires), actions, and plans. The representational formalism is described using a conceptual object-oriented hierarchy. An object-oriented design facilitates a uniform method (message) protocol that is naturally amenable to concurrency. The reasoning and acting behavior of the modeled agent is defined by an actor-like [Agha 1986, Agha and Hewitt 1987] message passing scheme. Semantically speaking, messages can be viewed as meta-level propositional attitudes (corresponding to 'belief' and 'intention') that are sent to/from propositions and acts in parallel. The message passing model, called a Rational Engine (as opposed to an inference engine), implements a BDI-architecture.