Intelligent Systems And Their Societies

Walter Fritz

Concepts in the General Learner

The General Learner (GL) represents inputs, received at the brain, as elementary concepts. These elementary concepts can be straight lines, curves or characters.

Concept and Environment
In order to function, GL must distinguish between certain related parts of the universe. For the example of an elementary concept consisting of a "line", the GL thus distinguishes between:

1. the concept of a line, existing as a structure in its memory.
2. the word "line" used as input or output.
3. the line itself that exists on its screen.

Program Representation
A concept (in our program, written in the C computer language) has the following structure:

typedef struct {   
char    Type;       /* the concept is related to a word, a drawing, an object or is a composite concept  */  
short   *pAddrT;    /* here the numbers of composite concepts which include this concept are stored */   
short   *pAddrP;    /* the numbers of concrete concepts, that are parts of this concept */   
short   *pAddrA;    /* the numbers of abstract concepts which include this concept */
short   *pAddrC;    /* the numbers of concrete concepts, for which this concept is the abstract */   
short   *pAddrRs;   /* the concept is used in the situation part of these response rules */   
short   *pAddrRr;   /* the concept is used in the response part of these response rules */   
short   *pAddrRp;   /* the concept is used in these rule patterns */
} DataC;

The system manipulates the concept, using a "name", a label, that has the peculiarity that it is not composed of letters but is an integer number. This number is related to the location where the concept is stored. In the present GL this is a number between 10001 and 19999.

Hierarchy of Concepts
The GL may collect several related elementary concepts , and represent them as a composite concept.
This may happen when it creates a new composite concept with links to its part concepts; Here the IS uses the contents as A and B and C. For instance the concept triangle has as contents the label of line A and of line B and of line C; each of which is a separate elementary concept.

Also it may create a concept with links to its concrete concepts (its examples); Here the IS uses the contents as A or B or C. For instance a tree can be a pine tree or an oak or a maple tree.

Finally, the contents of composite concepts are concepts that may themselves be elementary or composite.

Responses as Concepts
The present General Learner (GL) represents responses with the same elementary concepts as those used in the sense inputs. It can do this, since reading and writing a character are symmetrical, just as perceiving a drawing or making a drawing is symmetrical. We are aware that this is just a special case and that future versions of the GL will have to use elementary actions that are different from the elementary sensations when their actuators are different from the present ones. Still, both will be concepts.

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