microworld
In plain wordsA small, deliberately simplified artificial setting, such as a table of toy blocks, in which an AI program can be tested in full detail before anyone tries it in the messy real world.
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AI research
A deliberately restricted domain whose objects, actions and vocabulary are few and fully specified, chosen so that a program can show complete understanding or competence within it. The microworld strategy, associated with the MIT AI Laboratory around 1970, held that intelligence could be studied by building deep competence in such toy domains, such as the blocks worldblocks world, n.: A simplified pretend world of toy blocks on a table that early AI researchers used to test programs for planning, seeing and understanding language, because it was simple enough to describe completely. or simple physics and geometry problems, and later extending or combining them. Programs such as SHRDLUSHRDLU, prop. n.: A program from around 1970 that let people move toy blocks in a simulated world by typing ordinary English commands and questions, and that could explain what it had done and why. were celebrated within their microworlds, but their methods rarely transferred to open-ended settings, and critics such as Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus, prop. n.: An American philosopher who argued from the 1960s that computers following explicit rules could never match human intelligence, which rests on bodily, intuitive know-how. argued that real understanding depends on background knowledge no microworld contains. The term recurs in debates over whether success on narrow benchmarksbenchmark, n.: A fixed, shared test — a set of questions or tasks with an agreed way of scoring — used to compare AI systems with one another and to track progress over time. or simulated environments generalizes.
Critics called the new benchmark a microworld: agents mastered it without learning anything useful outside it.
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Education
In Seymour PapertSeymour Papert, prop. n.: A South African-born mathematician who co-wrote 'Perceptrons', a critique of early neural networks, with Marvin Minsky, and invented the children's programming language Logo.'s educational theory, a self-contained computational environment, such as the turtle geometry of the Logo language, in which learners explore and build ideas by programming.
Origin
Promoted by Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts. and Seymour Papert at MIT in their proposals and progress reports to ARPA of about 1970–1972, and spread with SHRDLU and other MIT projects of the early 1970s. Papert carried the word into education with the Logo learning environments described in 'Mindstorms' (1980).
Usage note
Later embodied, situated and statistical approaches to AI rejected the assumption that competence in a toy world scales up; the word is now often used critically.
Related
- blocks worldblocks world, n.: A simplified pretend world of toy blocks on a table that early AI researchers used to test programs for planning, seeing and understanding language, because it was simple enough to describe completely.
- SHRDLUSHRDLU, prop. n.: A program from around 1970 that let people move toy blocks in a simulated world by typing ordinary English commands and questions, and that could explain what it had done and why.
- symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts.
- Seymour PapertSeymour Papert, prop. n.: A South African-born mathematician who co-wrote 'Perceptrons', a critique of early neural networks, with Marvin Minsky, and invented the children's programming language Logo.
- AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.
Mentioned in
blocks worldblocks world, n.: A simplified pretend world of toy blocks on a table that early AI researchers used to test programs for planning, seeing and understanding language, because it was simple enough to describe completely.