Perceptual symbol systems assume an analogue relationship between a symbol and its referent, whereas amodal symbol systems assume an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and its referent. According to perceptual symbol theories, the complete representation of an object, called a simulation, should reflect physical characteristics of the object. Amodal theories, in contrast, do not make this ...

  is only defined when the bottom is an odd prime. You can extend the definition to allow an odd positive number on the bottom using the Jacobi symbol. Most of the properties of Legendre symbols go through for Jacobi symbols, which makes Jacobi symbols very convenient for computation. We’ll see, however, that there is a price to pay for the greater generality: Euler’s formula no longer works,...

Because intelligent agents employ physically embodied cognitive systems to reason about the world, their cognitive abilities are constrained by the laws of physics. Scientists have used digital computers to develop and validate theories of physically embodied cognition. Computational theories of intelligence have advanced our understanding of the nature of intelligence and have yielded practica...

In the most different fields of science and the arts the word symbol has been used so generously that its sense became imprecise. In the last decades the concept of symbol has been used very frequently in the cognitive sciences but here the concept is very simplified. Peirce’s definition of the symbol, on the contrary, is complex and precise, that is why it is able to collaborate to a better un...

A key step in mapping the more conceptual stages of design onto computational systems involves identifying a vocabulary and ontology. While a number of high-level ontologies have been proposed, these are difficult to ground in terms of actual design instances, and manual definitions of the symbols are often incomplete and difficult to maintain. As an alternative, we propose an ”infant designer”...

Robotics can serve as a testbed for cognitive theories. One behavioral criterion for comparing theories is the extent to which their implementations can learn to exploit new environmental opportunities. Furthermore, a robotics testbed forces researcher to confront fundamental issues concerning how internal representations are grounded in activity. In our approach, a mobile robot takes the role ...

This paper studies the impact of interference asynchrony among different links in a wireless network. Without deliberate coordination and cooperation among the active links, there is a naturally occurring misalignment between the symbols of the targeted signal of a receiver and the symbols of the interfering signals. Interestingly, we show that the interference asynchrony can actually improve t...

We have been engaged in a series of projects in which Cassie, the SNePS cognitive agent, has been incorporated into a hardwareor software-simulated cognitive robot. In this paper, we present an informal summary of our approach to anchoring the abstract symbolic terms that denote Cassie’s mental entities in the lowerlevel structures used by embodied-Cassie to operate in the real (or simulated) w...

There has been much discussion recently about the scope and limits of purely symbolic models of the mind and abotlt the proper role of connectionism in cognitive modeling. This paper describes the "symbol grounding problem": How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads? How can the meanings...