Main points:

• Several cognitive functions are transversal in significant ways, including learning and attention
• Many identifiable cognitive functions interact in substantially and important ways, including short-term and long-term memory, inferencing, generalization, prediction and anticipation, to name a few
• Because of this cognitive systems must be studied as a whole; the architecture of mind must be a first-class citizen in those studies

By “architecture” we mean the structural and operational layout of a system; the constraints that are put on information flow and computation from the outset, and how these are allowed to grow and change over time. Just like people walking around in a building, the building imposing limitations on where they can walk (doors and walls) and what they can look at (windows and glass walls), a software architecture is a blueprint for the key components of a software system. Together with the hardware, the architecture of a system controls where and how information flows, and what computations are performed, in what order, and in what manner. The programming language chosen imposes constraints on what kinds of architecture is practically viable – for example, LISP presents very easy ways to write code that writes code, while C++ makes this very difficult. If automatic generation of code, and subsequent runtime-dependent running of such code, is part of the requirements of a system we are planning to construct, we would naturally feel less constrained if we could choose LISP over C++. There are of course other key factors that influence the choice programming language, and we will get to these shortly.

Many of the cognitive functions that have been studied implement anytime algorithms, in one way or another. It could be said that intelligence is in itself a form of anytime “algorithm”, because it must be interruptible at all times, and be able to balance how much time it spends on its various goals.

Main points:

• Software/hardware architecture has an effect in mainly two ways: the ability to parallelize processes, and the speed and nature of their interaction
• These features fundamentally affect both the theoretical possibilities and practical implementations of cognitive systems