HoµA - Hive of micro Agents architecture

Science Tangential Theories
7

An agent's Scope

A scope is an instrument through which an agent gets a narrow, particular perspective of the world.
In physical world there are all kind of scopes - telescopes, microscopes, stethoscopes, periscopes, endoscopes and so on. Each optimized for a specific, simpler perspective. Human fovea is another type of scope.

The HTM terminology for a scope is a SDR encoder that instead of trying to encode all available inputs into a single relevant (and potentially very large) input SDR that captures all details which are fed into a large learning network it selects only a handful of details which are encoded to a relatively small fixed size SDR that is passed to a scout’s relatively limited learning model.

Unlike their physical counterparts, a micro agent’s scope provides a much more simplified representation, let’s say 128 or 256 bit SDR size.

There are a few advantage of a tiny agent with a tiny scope focused on few features/input values in its small field of view:

  • the local complexity at which an agent is exposed is very low
  • then the computing resources needed for both learning, inference and scope itself are also tiny. Instantiating, learning and testing a new agent with a new scope can last around a second on a single core
  • which allows a massive parallel search - either evolutionary, systematic or even hand crafted - for relevant scopes.
  • whenever a new scope proves useful, since it focuses only on very few features of the context then it is relatively easy to expose the relevant ones and their significant correlations.

The available context

The context has two sources - external data: recent raw data from sensors. "true" input - internal data: recent activations of established experts - internal, or processed input

A particular scope that is tested by a scout exposes input from a handful of points from the context . If the scout does not discover a pattern within its scope, the scope and model is discarded and a different scope is instantiated and tried, through learning. whether a model “discovers” a significant pattern.

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