Summer 2020 Research and Scholarship

Introduction Greetings! We are the Intention Perception team working directly with Professor George Montañez. Our team consists of Amani Maina-Kilaas, Cynthia Hom, Kevin Ginta, and Cindy Lay. Our research aims to show that there exist scenarios in which the ability of an agent to perceive intention provides a measurable survival advantage. We show this by developing and running simulations to explore scenarios where this knowledge may be especially beneficial. Experiment 1: Predators and Prey In our first experiment, we create a predator and prey scenario, in which the predators try to eat the prey, and the prey try to avoid predators and eat food. In this scenario, we give the prey three different tiers of awareness. The lowest tier is no predator awareness—the prey can only see food. The next tier is proximity awareness—they are aware of the location of nearby predators and can try to avoid them accordingly. The highest tier—the intention awareness tier—grants prey the ability to kno...

Introduction and Overview of the Project Hello everyone! Our names are Hana Ahmed, Meg Kaye, and Nico Espinosa Dice, and we are working with Prof. George Montañez in the AMISTAD Lab (Artificial Machine Intelligence = Search Targets Awaiting Discovery) to formulate a mathematical theory of abductive reasoning. We hope to produce a machine learning model and graphical representation of creative problem-solving using abduction.  Many people are aware of induction and deduction as forms of logical reasoning. However, abduction is arguably the closest resemblance of day-to-day human reasoning processes. Abduction, while still loosely defined, is rooted in the generation of plausible explanatory hypotheses that are consistent with observed facts. The concept of abductive logic is generally associated with the mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders (C.S.) Peirce, and is regularly applied in real-life problem-solving tasks, such as medical diagnosis and criminology. Abduction, D...