Making Intelligent Systems Adaptive

Contemporary intelligent systems are isolated problem-solvers. They accept particular classes of problems, reason about them, perhaps request additional information, and eventually produce solutions. By contrast, human beings and other intelligent animals continuously adapt to the demands and opportunities presented by a dynamic environment. Adaptation plays a critical role in everyday behaviors, such as conducting a conversation, as well as in sophisticated professional behaviors, such as monitoring critically ill medical patients. To make intelligent systems similarly adaptive, we must augment their reasoning capabilities with capabilities for perception and action. Equally important, we must endow them with an attentional mechanism to allocate their limited computational resources among competing perceptions, actions, and cognitions, in real time. In this paper, we discuss functional objectives for “adaptive intelligent systems,” an architecture designed to achieve those objectives, and our continuing study of these objectives and architecture in the context of particular tasks. I