Newell's layers

• Allen Newell (father of AI?) noted that humans behave at several different levels.
• These levels can be broken down into time bands.
• He does it by orders of magnitude with neurons firing once every 10ms, psychological behaviour around 1s, and social behaviour on the order of 1000s of seconds and above.
• He then went on to build a Cognitive Architecture based on rules (Soar).
• This (and Anderson's ACT) has been successful in doing a range of tasks and emulating human psychological behavior.
• Unfortunately, it ignores the lower neural levels of behavior.
• In particular, this means that Soar can't really learn new symbols. It can't solve the symbol grounding task.
• Though it can learn in domains it already knows,
• it can't learn new domains.
• Consequently, it is difficult to have a domain general solution.