Learning to Efficiently Pursue Communication Goals on the Web with the GOSMR Architecture

We present GOSMR ("goal oriented scenario modeling robots"), a cognitive architecture designed to show coordinated, goal-directed behavior over the Internet, focusing on the web browser as a case study. The architecture combines a variety of artificial intelligence techniques, including planning, temporal difference learning, elementary reasoning over uncertainty, and natural language parsing, but is designed to be computationally lightweight. Its intended use is to be deployed on virtual machines in large-scale network experiments in which simulated users' adaptation in the face of resource denial should be intelligent but varied. The planning system performs temporal difference learning of action times, discounts goals according to hyperbolic discounting of time-to-completion and chance of success, takes into account the assertions of other agents, and separates abstract action from site-specific affordances. Our experiment, in which agents learn to prefer a social networking style site for sending and receiving messages, shows that utility-proportional goal selection is a reasonable alternative to Boltzmann goal selection for producing a rational mix of behavior.