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While reading Mindblindness, I had some thoughts about the "Intentionality Detector" (ID). The ID depends on a perception mechanism which determines whether an object is an agent with intents, or just an object being acted on by some force. This would be, in itself, an enormously useful tool. I know that there is some work which already handles this part, but it occurred to me there's another level.

There are intelligent agents, but there also might be "simple agents"-- objects/agents which are acting on their own, but are still following some very simple rules. These might be identified by looking for periodic motion. An example would be a machine operating in the same room as the robot-- perhaps a fan running slowly. Furthermore, there might be agents with periodic motion which is not as simple as the motion of a fan, which we expect to act deterministically.

The sort of motion I'm thinking of is most easily imagined by a Spirograph drawing toy, where there is both high frequency and low frequency periodic motion. There may be agents which have that high frequency periodic motion, with some other motion added in (perhaps a man-- or a robot-- operating a floor waxer, or even an insect flying in circles around a lightbulb). We still probably don't care about them-- from an interaction standpoint (though we still don't want to collide with them)-- but they'll look very much like intelligent agents anyway.

I'm cooking up an idea to deal with this. At the moment it's a bit of a toy, but it strikes me it might be worth writing a bit of matlab code to try and detect it.