Making Anyway

Goal-Proximity Decision Making: Who needs reward anyway?

Reinforcement learning (RL) models of decision-making cannot account for human decisions in the absence of prior reward or punishment. We propose a mechanism for choosing among available options based on goal-option association strengths, where association strengths between objects represent object proximity. The proposed mechanism, GoalProximity Decision-making (GPD), is implemented within the...

Whose body is it anyway? An updated model of healthcare decision-making rights for adolescents.

What's Good Software, Anyway?

A colleague heading a research group recently contacted me. The group had a piece of software that it was about to license out to a company. The software encapsulated the results of several years of work: some fancy algorithms for data manipulation. The company would take over the source code to maintain and evolve it. My colleague wanted to know what sort of “objectively testable guarantees” h...

Run Once, Write Anyway

Scheme is one of only a few languages with a concise specification and formal semantics. With such a foundation it should be easy to write portable code that, without modification, runs correctly on different Scheme implementations. Yet this goal has proved elusive – there are more than fifty Schemes and writing programs that are portable between even just a few of these implementations is tedi...

What Is AI, Anyway?

In this article, the scientific and technological goals of artificial intelligence, and a proposal of ten fundamental problems in AI research are discussed This article is an introduction to Scientific DataLink’s microfiche publication of the Yale AI technical reports In this context, examples of research conducted at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project relating to each of the research pro...