Do implementations (preferably open source) of the “Society of Mind” model exist

Question

I have been fascinated by Minsky's "Society of the Mind" for now close to two decades. However, I just realized that I have not come across any general implementation of the model (and preferably an implementation that is accessible and in the open source).

I recently ran into this article by Push Sing (now tragically deceased, student of Minsky), http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html where he also notes that such an implementation does not exist.

I wonder if someone knows differently and if such a project or corpus of software does exist.

Note: I am aware of SOAR, ACT-R, Cyc, etc.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The developing Society of Mind Cognitive Architecture (SMCA) (Venkatamuni, 2008) extends the Davis (2002; 2008) CAMAL cognitive architecture with extra processing layers using the society of mind and metacognition concepts. Intelligent behavior can be viewed as a combination of more simple behaviors. let's imagine a reactive agent that can only move towards and collect a resource in the environment. Building an optimal or metacognition agent cannot be done with just a community of such simple agents, as they need to interact or take help from other agents. Hence developing a cognitive architecture requires the development of many different types of agents, with different behaviors and capabilities. Just like a community of agents requires agents that perform at more abstract levels. In order to get a truly adaptable framework a “Society of Mind” needs a top layer catalyst like metacognition. Metacognition is defined as thinking about thinking and can be viewed in two ways: 

• Monitoring a group of agents in an intelligent or cognitive or robotic architecture (i.e. self-reflection) 

• Making changes by adopting effective strategies in that group of agents (i.e. meta-control)

This is an EPUB version of Marvin Minsky's "The Society of Mind" for e-readers. It is based on the web version at http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind.