How do skills work?

Applying a skill to generate action

I see the brain as storing a collection of skills. These skills do not do anything until retrieved and applied. Once retrieved, they are applied to generate action. I think that usually only one skill at a time is used to produce physical action. I think there is a separate process that selects

Birth and maturation

From the skills perspective, we hypothesize that information is copied from a DNA encoding to a brain-based encoding. There may be some decoding, but the information should be equivalent. Because of this presumed equivalence, I am not modeling that process.

Applying a skill to generate action

There are a number of different types of skills. I am modelling them with simplifying assumptions to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

• Simple movement such as walking or sitting, with a geometry and timing, but without integrated vision.
• Simple movement such as walking with limited visual orientation.
• Simple movement such as walking with limited experimenting.
• Simple movement with limited visual orientation to illustrate imitating a leader.

Learning

The initial goal is to convert imitating action into a skill representation for that same action.

Mating

There are a number of interesting challenges such as copying the DNA, possibly with mutations and then randomly mixing the DNA (for females). Skills appear to be mixed as viable chunks rather than as small skill components that might lead to fairly random behaviour. For example, gender-specific skills may cross over, but it appears that they are rarely totally scrambled. I shall not address any of these challenges.