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AGI

My AGI research roadmap: sixteen subfields to work through, a month-by-month reading list built like a self-taught graduate seminar, and the people worth following.

· Updated Jul 11, 2026


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Designing Artificial Intelligence

Goal

  • To create an agent that lives in computational space and is able to acquire and organize knowledge and use that to interact with humans and the world.
  • To create a physical agent which evolves like living systems to understand and help ourselves.

Currently Doing

Approaches in AI I Want to Learn

Problems to Solve

Readings

Cognitive Science

Overview

  • MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
  • The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence

History of AI, Science & Life

AI Algorithms, Structures and Methods

Cognitive Neuroscience & Psychology

Linguistics

Anthropology

Evolutionary

Readings on Advanced Topics

Each of the following topics can be covered in a graduate seminar for roughly a month, using the listed materials.

  1. Research goal(s) of AI: From Here to Human-Level AI, John McCarthy; Human-level artificial intelligence? Be serious!, Nils J. Nilsson; (AA)AI: more than the sum of its parts, Ronald J. Brachman; Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence, Shane Legg, Marcus Hutter; On Defining Artificial Intelligence, Pei Wang, with Commentaries and Author's Response
  2. Limitation of AI: Minds, machines and Gödel, J. R. Lucas; What Computers Can't Do, Hubert L. Dreyfus; Minds, Brains, and Programs, John R. Searle; The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose; Three Fundamental Misconceptions of Artificial Intelligence, Pei Wang
  3. Symbolic vs. connectionist AI: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search, Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon; Waking Up From the Boolean Dream, or, Subcognition as Computation, Douglas Hofstadter; On the proper treatment of connectionism, Paul Smolensky; Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: a Critical Analysis, Jerry A. Fodor, Zenon W. Pylyshyn; Artificial General Intelligence and Classical Neural Network, Pei Wang
  4. Machine learning: Deep Learning, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton; Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview, Juergen Schmidhuber; Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search, David Silver et al.; Different Conceptions of Learning: Function Approximation vs. Self-Organization, Pei Wang, Xiang Li
  5. Non-classical computation: Thinking may be more than computing, Peter Kugel; Approximate Reasoning Using Anytime Algorithms, Shlomo Zilberstein; Turing's Ideas and Models of Computation, Eugene Eberbach, Dina Goldin, Peter Wegner; Case-by-case Problem Solving, Pei Wang
  6. Credit assignment and resource allocation: Principles of Meta-Reasoning, Stuart Russell, Eric Wefald; Manifesto for an Evolutionary Economics of Intelligence, Eric B. Baum; Properties of the Bucket Brigade, John Holland; The Parallel Terraced Scan: An Optimization For An Agent-Oriented Architecture, John Rehling, Douglas Hofstadter; Problem-Solving under Insufficient Resources, Pei Wang
  7. Term logics: Term logic, Wikipedia; An Invitation to Formal Reasoning: The Logic of Terms, Frederic Sommers, George Englebretsen; Non-Axiomatic Logic: A Model of Intelligent Reasoning, Pei Wang
  8. Uncertain probabilities: Towards a unified theory of imprecise probability, Peter Walley; Probabilistic Logic Networks, Ben Goertzel et al.; Confidence as Higher-Order Uncertainty, Pei Wang
  9. Non-Tarskian semantics: Holism, Conceptual-Role Semantics, and Syntactic Semantics, William J. Rapaport; Logic without Model Theory, Robert Kowalski; Contentful Mental States for Robot Baby, Paul R. Cohen et al.; Procedural semantics, Philip N. Johnson-Laird; Experience-Grounded Semantics: A theory for intelligent systems, Pei Wang
  10. Sensorimotor and cognition: Intelligence without representation, Rodney A. Brooks; How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence, Rolf Pfeifer, Josh C. Bongard; The symbol grounding problem, Stevan Harnad; Perceptual symbol systems, Lawrence W. Barsalou; The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, James J. Gibson; Action in Perception, Alva Nöe; Perception from an AGI Perspective, Pei Wang, Patrick Hammer
  11. Analogy and metaphor: The Analogical Mind, Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, Boicho K. Kokinov; Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Douglas Hofstadter, FARG; Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson; Case-Based Reasoning: Experiences, Lessons, & Future Directions, David B. Leake; Analogy in a general-purpose reasoning system, Pei Wang
  12. Animal cognition: The Principles of Learning and Behavior, Michael Domjan; Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness, Donald R. Griffin; The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence, Richard Byrne; Issues in Temporal and Causal Inference, Pei Wang, Patrick Hammer
  13. Planning and decision making: Robot's Dilemma Revisited: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Zenon W. Pylyshyn; Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy, Patrick J. Hayes; Reasoning about plans, James F. Allen et al.; Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto; Assumptions of decision-making models in AGI, Pei Wang, Patrick Hammer
  14. Motivation and emotion: Human Motivation, David C. McClelland; The Functional Autonomy of Motives, Gordon W. Allport; The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, Marvin Minsky; Who Needs Emotions?: The Brain Meets the Robot, Jean-Marc Fellous, Michael A. Arbib; Motivation Management in AGI Systems and The Emotional Mechanisms in NARS, Pei Wang
  15. Cognitive linguistics: Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, Dirk Geeraerts; Language, Thought, and Logic, John M. Ellis; Natural Language Processing by Reasoning and Learning, Pei Wang
  16. Self and Consciousness: A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Bernard Baars; Metacognition in computation: A selected research review, Michael T. Cox; Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality, Walter J. Freeman; Self in NARS, an AGI System, Pei Wang, Xiang Li, Patrick Hammer
  17. Cognitive architecture: Unified Theories of Cognition, Allen Newell; An Integrated Theory of the Mind, John R. Anderson, et al.; Rigid Flexibility: The Logic of Intelligence, Pei Wang
  18. Robotics: An Introduction to AI Robotics, Robin R. Murphy; Prospects for Human Level Intelligence for Humanoid Robots, Rodney A. Brooks; Autonomous Mental Development by Robots and Animals, Juyang Weng et al.; Solving a Problem With or Without a Program, Pei Wang
  19. Agent and multi-agent system: The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky; Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications, and Markets, Nicholas R. Jennings, Michael J. Wooldridge; Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Gerhard Weiss; From NARS to a Thinking Machine, Pei Wang

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