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It has been routinely observed, that when simulating a robot,
one must have two world models: one world model external to the robot
and the other world model internal to the robot.
"The design, implementation, and use of the robot hardware
presents some difficult, and often expensive, engineering and
maintenance problems. If one is to work in this area solving such
problems it is a necessary prelude but, more often than not,
unrewarding because the activity does not address the questions of
A.I. reseach that motivate the project. Why, then, build devices?
Why not simulate them and their environment? In fact, the SRI group
has done good work in simulating a version of their robot in a
simplified environment. The answer given is as follows. It is felt
by the SRI group that the most unsatisfactory part of their
simulation effort was the simulation of the environment. Yet, they
say that 90% of the effort of the simulation team went into this
part of the simulation. It turned out to be very difficult to
reproduce in an internal representation for a computer the necessary
richness of environment that would give rise to interesting behavior
by the highly adaptive robt. It is easier and cheaper to build a
hardware robot to extract what information it needs from the real
world than to organize and store a useful model. Crudely put, the
SRI group's argument is that the most economic and efficient store
of information about the real world is the real world itself."
- E. A. Fiegenbaum [ref. X].
The real world of course represents itself, but it is not a
good memory of itself because there is no simple addressing
mechanism. A machine can not easily (i.e. directly) read the world
states that are relevant to its given task. Conclusions about the
state of the world are reached by incredible chains of reasoning
based (in the case of vision) on how the world scatters a certain
band of incoherent electromagnetic radiation. In particular,
perception itself requires an internal
environmental simulation almost exactly like the external simulator
Fiegenbaum mentions.