Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 65 of 68
The Talking Heads experiment
The key insight of the Talking Heads experiment is that agents develop their own individual and internal way of categorising the world they see. While, at the same time, through external communication, they negotiate a shared lexicon. Different agents may be talking about the same object, but they might conceptualize it differently, yet at the same time share words. Steels’ experiment illustrates how a communication system, grounded in the everyday world, can emerge through interactions between agents, yet not be defined in any one of them.