Can we incorporate sleep-like interruptions into evolutionary robotics?
Mario A. Zarco-Lopez and Tom Froese
Traditional use of Hopfield networks can be divided into two main categories: (1) constraint satisfaction based on predefined a weight space, and (2) model induction based on a training set of patterns. Recently, Watson et al. (2011) have demonstrated that combining these two aspects, i.e. by inducing a model of the network’s attractors by applying Hebbian learning after constraint satisfaction, can lead to self-optimization of network connectivity. A key element of their approach is a repeated randomized reset and relaxation of network state, which has been interpreted as similar to the function of sleep (Woodward, Froese, & Ikegami, 2015). This perspective might give rise to an alternative “wake-sleep” algorithm (Hinton, Dayan, Frey, & Neal, 1995). All of this research, however, has taken place with isolated artificial neural networks, which goes against decades of work on situated robotics (Cliff, 1991). We consider the challenges involved in extending this work on sleep-like self-optimization to the dynamical approach to cognition, in which behavior is seen as emerging from the interactions of brain, body and environment (Beer, 2000).
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4E Cognition Group 