People are remarkably good at “muddling through”, at not getting completely stuck, at continuing to make some progress even when things don’t go as planned. Machines, on the other hand, tend to fail in dramatic fashion when they are faced with unusual circumstances.

UMBC professor Tim Oates is working on building more robust intelligent systems through metacognition, which is the ability to think about your own thinking. Meta-cognitive systems can notice when things are not going well (as opposed to just plowing ahead with whatever they were doing, which is what most systems do today), reason about possible sources of the problem, and try various repairs.

Professor Oates and his colleagues have constructed a meta-cognitive computer player for the tank game Bolo that learns from its mistakes and adapts its knowledge, tactics, and strategies as it faces new challenges in the game and more capable human or automated opponents. For more information see the ALMECOM pages, some of the detailed papers on metacognition in Bolo and the UMBC games, animation and interactive media blog.

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