The present introduction to the Fluent Calculus is intended as an ETAI reference article. It summarizes basic definitions and concepts in the Fluent Calculus, and is intended as a reference for future articles where the calculus is used.

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We are building an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think" by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to (...) fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience. (shrink)