Project

LifeNet: Common-Sense Physics

LifeNet is a probabilistic spatial and temporal model allowing common-sense physical simulation. Mixtures of gaussians are used to map from the physical world's real numbers to human language's symbolic conceptual world. Humans are very good at moving around and physically manipulating the world in which they live, quickly considering many collections of physical events and objects in order to choose a set of actions. The current state of the art in computer physics simulations does not take advantage of common-sense knowledge such as "things usually fall if not supported." Building a common-sense physics simulation allows us to take a paragraph of text and quickly reconstruct the physical situation in more or less detail as required for inference, planning, and further reflective algorithms. Immediately possible applications include interpreting sensor data, comparing physical descriptions of events in text, and efficiently planning in multiscale, robotic physical manipulation environments.