Self-organized and Evolvable Cognitive Architecture for Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Integrating different kinds of micro-theories of cognition in intelligent systems when a huge amount of variables are changing continuously, with increasing complexity, is a very exhaustive and complicated task. Our approach proposes a hybrid cognitive architecture that relies on the integration of emergent and cognitivist approaches using evolutionary strategies, in order to combine implicit and explicit knowledge representations necessary to develop cognitive skills. The proposed architecture includes a cognitive level controlled by autopoietic machines and artificial immune systems based on genetic algorithms, giving it a significant degree of plasticity. Furthermore, we propose an attention module which includes an evolutionary programming mechanism in charge of orchestrating the hierarchical relations among specialized behaviors, taking into consideration the global workspace theory for consciousness. Additionally, a co-evolutionary mechanism is proposed to propagate knowledge among cognitive agents on the basis of memetic engineering. As a result, several properties of self-organization and adaptability emerged when the proposed architecture was tested in an animat environment, using a multi-agent platform.