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Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.[1]

One of the most important milestones in theory of mind development is gaining the ability to attribute false belief: that is, to recognize that others can have beliefs about the world that are wrong. To do this, it is suggested, one must understand how knowledge is formed, that people’s beliefs are based on their knowledge, that mental states can differ from reality, and that people’s behavior can be predicted by their mental states. Numerous versions of the false-belief task have been developed, based on the initial task done by Wimmer and Perner (1983).

In the most common version of the false-belief task (often called the ‘Sally-Anne’ task), children are told or shown a story involving two characters. For example, in one version, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, playing with a marble. The dolls put away the marble in a box, and then Sally leaves. Anne takes the marble out and plays with it again, and after she is done, puts it away in a different box. Sally returns and the child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the first box where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the second box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding. The results of research using false-belief tasks have been fairly consistent: most normally-developing children are unable to pass the tasks until around the age of three or four.

A Voyage to Functional Programming in F#

Finally I settled on F#. Both LISP and F# are belong to functional programming (FP) paradigm.Functional programming is a complete different paradigm from imperative (and OO) programming.I found it terse as well yet I can understand it (though some of the concepts are new to me).The advantage is it can use .NET Framework. Thus it gives me a break from OOP and yet taps the power from the familiar .NET Framework.Therefore I decided to dive into it to seem whether functional programming can deliver its claims in terms of productivity and expression power.I would like to share my findings in this blog to those interested in learning functional programming.

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) software model (usually referred to simply, but ambiguously, as BDI) is a software model developed for programming intelligent agents. Superficially characterized by the implementation of an agent's beliefs, desires and intentions, it actually uses these concepts to solve a particular problem in agent programming. In essence, it provides a mechanism for separating the activity of selecting a plan (from a plan library) from the execution of currently active plans. Consequently, BDI agents are able to balance the time spent on deliberating about plans (choosing what to do) and executing those plans (doing it). A third activity, creating the plans in the first place (planning), is not within the scope of the model, and is left to the system designer and programmer.