| | Goal-oriented problem solving, inference, and analogy inference tools have been developed for a variety of commonsense reasoning applications by the Common Sense Computing group. The HomeSim project is visualizing as well as simulating the physical semantic relationships between objects in a commonsense physical world. We believe this tool will be very useful for building and debugging commonsense agents that learn from their interactions with a complex human world. For example, imagine that we are building an agent that wants to experiment in order to learn how to make a cup of tea. Perhaps our agent knows a recipe, including the ingredients for such a process, but does not know how long the process might take. Such an agent may be able to experiment in a commonsense simulation like HomeSim in order to realize that one needs to walk around a kitchen, fill a pot with water, boil the water on the stove, and let the tea steep and cool in a cup before it is at a safe temperature for drinking. We believe that having HomeSim as a visual simulation tool will be invaluable in helping us to debug the physical qualitative physical commonsense reasoning processes that are currently being developed by the MIT Media Lab's Software Agents Group. |
