The SIM_AGENT Package

Unlike many so-called'agent toolkits', like PRS/Jack, Mozart, Alice, and several more, that are aimed mainly at development of systems involving large numbers of highly distributed fairly homogeneous relatively'small' agents, SimAgent can be used for such purposes (and was used in that way for a while by Matthias Scheutz at Notre Dame University) but (like ACT-R, COGENT, and the original SOAR) SimAgent is primarily designed to support design and implementation of very complex agents, each composed of very different interacting components (like a human mind) where the whole thing is embedded in an environment that could be a mixture of physical objects and other agents of many sorts, as half-jokingly depicted here: That schema accommodates a wide variety of specific architecture types, which differ according to which mechanisms and information structures occur in which boxes, and how they are connected to one another and to the environment, as described in this overview. The above diagram is misleading in various ways because it suggest that the perception mechanisms and action mechanisms are separate from each other and can only communicate via the'central' mechanisms, whereas it is clear (as James Gibson pointed out in his 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems) action and perception are deeply integrated, e.g. the constant use of saccades, changes of vergence, changes of focus in vision, and the need to move your hand when it is used to perceive shape, texture, weight, flexibility, hardness, etc. of objects. So a more accurate, but less clear depiction of the ideas in the CogAff architecture schema is the following (with thanks to Dean Petters, for help with this diagram, indicating that action and perception mechanisms overlap, as pointed out by J.J.Gibson in 1966(Referenced above). Revised, more realistic CogAff Architecture Schema, e.g. with deeper integration between action and perception The horizontal discs represent (usually "fuzzy" boundaries between different levels of functionality. It is possible for some of the information-processing mechanisms to straddle two or more layers.