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16 AGI Preschool

or otherwise based on the light available to them (without of course trying to simulate the
chemistry of photosynthesis).

Some elements of chemistry may be achieved as well, though nowhere near what exists
in physical reality. For instance, melting and boiling at least should be doable: assign every
bead a temperature, and let solid interbead bonds turn liquid above a certain temperature and
disappear completely above some higher temperature. You could even have a simple form of fire.
Let fire be an element, whose beads have negative gravitational mass. Beads of fuel elements
like wood have a threshold temperature above which they will turn into fire beads, with release
of additional heat.²

The philosophy underlying these suggested bead dynamics is somewhat comparable to that
outlined in Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science [Wol02]. There he proposes cellular au-
tomata models that emulate the qualitative characteristics of various real-world phenomena,
without trying to match real-world data precisely. For instance, some of his cellular automata
demonstrate phenomena very similar to turbulent fluid flow, without implementing the Navier-
Stokes equations of fluid dynamics or trying to precisely match data from real-world turbulence.
Similarly, the beads in BlocksNBeadsWorld are intended to qualitatively demonstrate the real-
world phenomena most useful for the development of humanlike embodied intelligence, without
trying to precisely emulate the real-world versions of these phenomena.

The above description has been left imprecisely specified on purpose. It would be straight-
forward to write down a set of equations for the block and bead interactions, but there seems
little value in articulating such equations without also writing a simulation involving them and
testing the ensuing properties. Due to the complex dynamics of bead interactions, the fine-
tuning of the bead physics is likely to involve some tuning based on experimentation, so that
any equations written down now would likely be revised based on experimentation anyway. Our
goal here has been to outline a certain class of potentially useful environments, rather than to
articulate a specific member of this class.

Without the beads, BlocksNBeadsWorld would appear purely as a “Blocks World with Glue”
– essentially a substantially upgraded version of the Blocks Worlds frequently used in AI, since
first introduced in [Win72]. Certainly a pure “Blocks World with Glue” would have greater
simplicity than BlocksNBeadsWorld, and greater richness than standard Blocks World; but
this simplicity comes with too many limitations, as shown by consideration of the various naive
physics requirements inventoried above. One simply cannot run the full spectrum of humanlike
cognitive development experiments, or preschool educational tasks, using blocks and glue alone.
One can try to create analogous tasks using only blocks and glue, but this quickly becomes
extremely awkward. Whereas in the BlocksNBeadsWorld the capability for this full spectrum
of experiments and tasks seems to fall out quite naturally.

What’s missing from BlocksNBeadsWorld should be fairly obvious. There isn’t really any
distinction between a fluid and a powder: there are masses, but the types and properties of the
masses are not the same as in the real world, and will surely lack the nuances of real-world fluid
dynamics. Chemistry is also missing: processes like cooking and burning, although they can be
crudely emulated, will not have the same richness as in the real world. The full complexity of
body processes is not there: the body-design method mentioned above is far richer and more
adaptive and responsive than current methods of designing virtual bodies in 3DSMax or Maya
and importing them into virtual world or game engines, but still drastically simplistic compared
to real bodies with their complex chemical signaling systems and couplings with other bodies
and the environment. The hypothesis we’re making in this section is that these lacunae aren’t

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² Thanks are due to Russell Wallace for the suggestions in this paragraph

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