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Concept lobe

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Revision as of 06:14, 22 August 2014 by Futhark (talk | contribs) (Rewrite and distinguish from combination lobe (which needs an article now))
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The concept lobe recognizes situations in order to provide processed sensory information to the decision lobe. In certain breeds, it also provides this information to the attention lobe. It serves a similar role to the combination lobe of the Creatures Evolution Engine games but has a more limited capacity to represent information.

Sensory Processing

The concept lobe processes sensory information neurons represent the situations a creature is able to recognize while interpreting the raw sensory inputs. For example, a neuron could represent "I am hungry, and I am looking at food". This recognition is achieved by having some inputs (between one and three of them) from neurons in the perception lobe. The cell fires when its input neurons are all firing. Since each perception lobe neuron represents some feature extracted from the environment (including "I am hungry" and "I am looking at food"), a neuron fires whenever some combination of things is true about the creature's immediate circumstances.

Other possible meanings include "I am hungry and I see food" or "There is a creature and it is a Grendel and it is approaching".

Decision Support

Main article: Decision lobe

Each neuron outputs to zero or more of the decision lobe neurons. Each output has a weight, which can be positive or negative and determines whether the concept lobe neuron's firing will increase or decrease that decision's score. Semantically, the weight is how good an idea that decision is when this situation is happening.

Learning

The concept lobe’s inputs and outputs are where almost all learning takes place. Since a brain can only contain a few hundred concepts at once, the reward and punishment mechanism is designed to make each neuron try assigning itself to random situations until it happens upon one that helps the creature seek reward or avoid punishment. This is implemented technically by strengthening recently-active inputs when reward or punishment happens and weakening them whenever the creature tries to do something but isn't rewarded or punished (called "disappointment”). If a neuron’s input connections get too weak, they are reassigned at random to a new set of neurons in the perception lobe.

See also