About H. Van Dyke Parunak H. Van Dyke Parunak is Vice President for Technology Innovation at AxonAI, Inc. He has extensive experience in both academic and industrial environments with chaos and complex systems, artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and human interfaces. Since 1984, he led the Agent-based and Complex Systems Research group, housed since 1984 in a variety of companies, studying swarm intelligence, emergent Read More About...

A perennial challenge in cognitive science is framing an architecture powerful enough to be a credible support for human reasoning, yet simple enough to map to the known machinery of the human brain. Work done in the 1970s on systems such as Soar framed many of the problems, but the complex symbol processing in such systems is not a persuasive model for actual brain function. At the other extreme, models such as Braitenberg’s Vehicles [1] show how very simple circuits can produce surprisingly realistic movement behaviors from reasonable sensors, and models such as Minsky’s Society of Mind [2] suggest that collections of such reasoners might account for human cognition, but the details of this fusion remain obscure. This volume offers a coherent theory, together with a range of simulation experiments and modeling formalisms, for combining communities of simple reasoners into coherent higher-level systems.