Artificial Intelligence without Using Ontological Data about a Presupposed Reality

This paper introduces an original model to provide software agents and robots with the capacity of learning by interpreting regularities in their stream of sensorimotor experience rather than by exploiting data that would give them ontological information about a predefined domain. Specifically, this model pulls inspiration from: a) the movement of embodied cognition, b) the philosophy of knowledge, c) constructivist epistemology, and d) the theory of enaction. Respectively to these four influences: a) Our agents discover their environment through their body’s active capacity of experimentation. b) They do not know their environment “as such” but only “as they can experience it”. c) They construct knowledge from regularities of sensorimotor experience. d) They have some level of constitutive autonomy. Technically, this model differs from the traditional perception / cognition/action model in that it rests upon atomic sensorimotor experiences rather than separating percepts from actions. We present algorithms that implement this model, and we describe experiments to validate these algorithms. These experiments show that the agents exhibit a certain form of intelligence through their behaviors, as they construct proto-ontological knowledge of the phenomena that appear to them when they observe persistent possibilities of sensorimotor experiences in time and space. These results promote a theory of artificial intelligence without ontological data about a presupposed reality. An application includes a more robust way of creating robots capable of constructing their own knowledge and goals in the real world, which could be initially unknown to them and un-modeled by their designers.