Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 59 of 68
The world is its own best model
Situatedness refers to an agent being located in a complex environment, rather than a highly abstracted micro-world. The complexities of real environments are taken to be fundamentally different from those of the abstracted “micro-worlds”. Indeed, being situated permits the exploiting of structure in the world, lessening the burden of internal representations. Elsie, Walter’s robotic tortoise, exploited the location of the recharging station inside the hutch. No model of the hutch is ever invoked by Elsie. Its function was the result of the interaction between Elsie’s sensors and the real-world. Rodney Brooks sums up this kind of relationship by arguing that “the world is its own best model”.