Intelligent Control

In my 1985 paper, “A Blackboard Architecture for Control” [7], I claimed that the control problem is fundamental to all cognitive processes and intelligent systems. At each point in time, many actions may be logically possible, given the current state of the task environment. An intelligent agent must choose among them, either implicitly or explicitly. For a given task, the agent’s solution to the control problem determines what actions it performs and, therefore, what goals it achieves, what resources it uses, and what side effects it produces. More generally, the agent’s approach to control determines its potential range of behavior, its run-time flexibility, and its coherence and comprehensibility to observers.