Anomaly Driven Concept Acquisition

In this paper, we identify some principles of Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis theory and Piaget's theory of child development, both of which fall into the constructivist category of epis-temology. We then apply them to the problem of autonomous concept acquisition for artiicial agents. One consequence of constructivist philosophy is that concept acquistion should be possible in situations (anomalies) which were completely unforeseen by a human designer of the system. Another major consequence is that concepts should not merely be deened on the formal logical level, but should be rooted in sensorimotor interaction with the environment. This requires the existence of an intermediate level in the architecture which allows the construction of original response patterns. We also consider the computational implications of the Piagetian concept of integrating environment-driven and model-driven tendencies when searching for new concepts (known as accommodation and assimilation respectively).