Modeling Robotic Thinking and Creativity: A Classic–Quantum Dialogue

The human mind can be thought of as a black box, where the external inputs are elaborated in an unknown way and lead to external outputs. D’Ariano and Faggin schematized thinking and consciousness through quantum state dynamics. The complexity of mental states can be formalized through the entanglement of the so-called qualia states. Thus, the interaction between the mind and the external world can be formalized as an interplay between classical and quantum-state dynamics. Since quantum computing is more and more often being applied to robots, and robots constitute a benchmark to test schematic models of behavior, we propose a case study with a robotic dance, where the thinking and moving mechanisms are modeled according to quantum–classic decision making. In our research, to model the elaboration of multi-sensory stimuli and the following decision making in terms of movement response, we adopt the D’Ariano–Faggin formalism and propose a case study with improvised dance based on a collection of poses, whose combination is presented in response to external and periodic multi-sensory stimuli. We model the dancer’s inner state and reaction to classic stimuli through a quantum circuit. We present our preliminary results, discussing further lines of development.