Our
Mission |
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Our
passion is to create creatures whose behavior, form and underlying architecture
not only informs our understanding of the natural intelligence displayed
by animals and ultimately ourselves, but that also touches a person interacting
with them on a profound personal level. We are as concerned with the elegance,
simplicity and beauty of the underlying ideas as we are with the observable
form and behavior. Much as an artist does not simply record what is there,
but rather shows what he or she sees there, so too, we view the creatures
that we create as personal statements that ideally celebrate their subject
but which also challenge us to ask important questions about the nature
and meaning of intelligence as well as our relationship to, and with,
animals.
At the heart of this work is the search for the “computational scaffolding”
or alternatively “conceptual primitives” that form the basis
of commonsensical behavior and learning. Rather than taking a top-down
or bottom-up approach, we start in the middle, informed by nature, and
ask “what does the observed behavior of animals such as dogs seem
to imply about the underlying representations and processes that allow
them to behave and learn in a commonsensical manner?” Our belief
is the best way to gain insight into this question is to build synthetic
characters that solve similar problems, and by doing so, the key insights
will emerge. Our expectation is that through this work we will uncover
“catalytic” representations and processes whose presence bootstraps
more powerful ones. By doing so, the work will not only inform top-down
and bottom-up approaches, but will also inform our understanding of the
natural phenomena. |
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