The subtlety of sameness : a theory and computer model of analogy-making

Author(s)

    • French, Robert M. (Robert Matthew)

Bibliographic Information

The subtlety of sameness : a theory and computer model of analogy-making

Robert M. French

MIT Press, c1995

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Note

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references (p. [181]-185) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving-in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. Foreword by Daniel Dennett While it is fashionable today to dismiss the "bad old days" of artificial intelligence and rave about emergent self-organizing systems, Robert French has created a model of human analogy-making that attempts to bridge the gap between classical top-down AI and more recent bottom-up approaches. The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving-in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. At the heart of the author's theory and computer model of analogy-making is the idea that the building-up and the manipulation of representations are inseparable aspects of mental functioning, in contrast to traditional AI models of high-level cognitive processes, which have almost always depended on a clean separation. A computer program called Tabletop forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects on a table set for a meal. The theory and the program rely on the idea that myriad stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to statistical robustness on a macrolevel. To illustrate this, French includes the results of thousands of runs of his program on several dozen interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld. French's work is exciting not only because it reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness but also because it offers a computational model of mechanisms underlying these processes. This model makes significant strides in putting into practice microlevel stochastic processing, distributed processing, simulated parallelism, and the integration of representation-building and representation-processing. A Bradford Book

Table of Contents

  • From recognition to analogy-making - the central role of slippage
  • the Tabletop microdomain
  • the architecture of Tabletop
  • Tabletop's performance up close
  • Tabletop's personality profile
  • comparisons with other work
  • summary and conclusions.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

  • NCID
    BA26704352
  • ISBN
    • 0262061805
  • LCCN
    95008723
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Cambridge
  • Pages/Volumes
    xvi, 190 p.
  • Size
    26 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
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