Building Diverse Intelligences Through Compositionality and Mechanism Design

This meeting brings together the project leaders who are part of the project “Building Diverse Intelligences through Compositionality and Mechanism Design,” a “Framework” grant funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF), awarded in 2022.

This project asks a key question in complexity science: , How do semi-independent, dynamic, adaptive processes achieve necessary coordination to function as an intelligent, higher-level whole? For the past three years, each project leader has been working on a sub-project that investigates this question in a particular context. At this meeting, we will share these findings and lay the groundwork for a more general theory that explains how intelligent systems are built by (and out of) adaptive parts.

The topics for discussion at the working group are as follows: • How communities of humans compete and cooperate to solve problems. • The interplay between evolutionary search and physical/material affordances in soft robotics. • Models of norms and institutions, including new compositional formalisms. • Approaches to compositionality and mechanism design in artificial intelligence, including hypernets, large language models, and active symbol systems. • Formalisms for the endogenous construction of institutions and other guiding mechanisms.