MS Project Defense - Gaurav Singh

Discourse without Words

Gaurav Singh, MS Candidate

Wednesday, Apr. 24, 2019, 4:30 pm
Dunn Hall 375B Conference Room

Committee Members:

Abstract

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that humans are born with a notion of time and space that is required as a necessary precondition for cognition. Thus, to facilitate proper discourse between participants, they must be able to sense their environment and act on it accordingly, perhaps without additional capabilities. It can be argued that the use of traditional language is not required for a successful discourse to take place among participants. In this project, I present some evidence for such an argument by introducing a framework that allows researchers to create multiple discourse systems (DS). In it, different modules can be mixed and matched to create a variety of discourse systems. The modules are container spaces, agents, memory modules and intelligence modules. The framework was built using Python 2.6 and Pygame library to render the simulations. The systems are then evaluated based on two metrics of communication effectiveness of the agents (survival success and effectiveness in learning an environment.) The results demonstrate that these systems can indeed increase survival capabilities despite the lack of a symbolic language for communication.