Mind Games: Game Engines as an Architecture for Intuitive Physics.

Journal: Trends in cognitive sciences
Published Date: Sep 1, 2017

Abstract

We explore the hypothesis that many intuitive physical inferences are based on a mental physics engine that is analogous in many ways to the machine physics engines used in building interactive video games. We describe the key features of game physics engines and their parallels in human mental representation, focusing especially on the intuitive physics of young infants where the hypothesis helps to unify many classic and otherwise puzzling phenomena, and may provide the basis for a computational account of how the physical knowledge of infants develops. This hypothesis also explains several 'physics illusions', and helps to inform the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with more human-like common sense.

Authors

  • Tomer D Ullman
    Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Center for Brains,Minds and Machines,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge,MA 02139tomeru@mit.eduhttp://www.mit.edu/~tomeru/.
  • Elizabeth Spelke
    Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
  • Peter Battaglia
    DeepMind Technologies, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
  • Joshua B Tenenbaum
    Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. gershman@fas.harvard.edu horvitz@microsoft.com jbt@mit.edu.

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