16.6 Issues with Virtual Preschool Engineering 299

16.6 Issues with Virtual Preschool Engineering 299 1. one could carry out all the standard cognitive development experiments described in devel- opmental psychology books 2. one could implement intuitively reasonable versions of all the standard activities in all the standard learning stations in a contemporary preschool then current virtual world technologies appear not to suffice. As reviewed above, typical preschool activities include for instance building with blocks, playing with clay, looking in a group at a picture book and hearing it read aloud, mixing ingredients together, rolling/throwing/catching balls, playing games like tag, hide-and-seek, Simon Says or Follow the Leader, measuring objects, cutting paper into different shapes, drawing and coloring, etc. And, as typical, not necessarily representative examples of tasks psychologists use to mea- sure cognitive development (drawn mainly from the Piagetan tradition, without implying any assertion that this is the only tradition worth pursuing), consider the following: 1. Which row has more circles- A or B? A: O O OO O, B: OOOOO 2. If Mike is taller than Jim, and Jim is shorter than Dan, then who is the shortest? Who is the tallest? Which is heavier- a pound of feathers or a pound of rocks? 4. Eight ounces of water is poured into a glass that looks like the fat glass in Figure 2 16.1 and then the same amount is poured into a glass that looks like the tall glass in Figure 16.2 . Which glass has more water? 5. A lump of clay is rolled into a snake. All the clay is used to make the snake. Which has more clay in it — the lump or the snake? 6. There are two dolls in a room, Sally and Ann, each of which has her own box, with a marble hidden inside. Sally goes out for a minute, leaving her box behind; and Ann decides to play a trick on Sally: she opens Sally’s box, removes the marble, hiding it in her own box. Sally returns, unaware of what happened. Where will Sally would look for her marble? 7. Consider this rule about a set of cards that have letters on one side and numbers on the other: “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” If you have 4 cards labeled “E K 4 7”, which cards do you need to turn over to tell if this rule is actually true? 8. Design an experiment to figure out how to make a pendulum that swings more slowly versus less slowly ad What we see from this ad hoc, partial list is that a lot of naive physics is required to make an even vaguely realistic preschool. A lot of preschool education is about the intersection between abstract cognition and naive physics. A more careful review of the various tasks involved in preschool education bears out this conclusion. With this in mind, in this section we will briefly describe an approach to extending current virtual world technologies that appears to allow the construction of a reasonably rich and realistic AGI preschool environment, without requiring anywhere near a complete simulation of realistic physics. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013215