Analogy

(a subtopic of Reasoning)

"Analogy-based reasoning: This term is sometimes used, as a synonym to case-based reasoning, to describe the typical case-based approach... However, it is also often used to characterize methods that solve new problems based on past cases from a different domain, while typical case-based methods focus on indexing and matching strategies for single-domain cases." - A. Aamodt and E. Plaza

A veritable cognitive mind. By R. Colin Johnson EE Times (July 28, 2003). "Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI's founding father, says today's artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the 'big' AI problem. Indeed, according to Minsky, the missing element is something so big that we can't see it: common sense. 'To me the problem is how to get common sense into computers,' said Minsky. 'And part of that, it seems to me, is not how to solve any particular problem but how to quickly think of a new way to solve it-perhaps through a change in emotional state-when the usual method doesn't work.' In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context of discovering that missing cognitive glue. ... Reasoning by analogy is a way of adapting old knowledge, which almost never perfectly matches the present situation, by following a recipe of detecting differences and tweaking parameters. It all happens so quickly that no 'thinking' seems to be involved."

Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues, Methodological Variations, and System Approaches. By A. Aamodt and E. Plaza. (1994) Artificial Intelligence Communications, IOS Press, Vol. 7:1, pp. 39 - 59.

Exploiting Domain Geometry in Analogical Route Planning. K.Z. Haigh, J.R. Shewchuk, and M.M. Veloso Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, No. 9, September, 1997, pp. 509 - 541. "Automated route planning consists of using real maps to automatically find good map routes. ... Analogical reasoning is a method of using past experience to improve problem solving performance in similar new situations. Our approach consists of the accumulation and reuse of previously traversed routes."

Design, Analogy, and Creativity. By Ashok K. Goel. IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 12(3):62-70, May/June 1997. "Analogical reasoning appears to play a key role in creative design. This article briefly reviews recent AI research on analogy-based creative design before enumerating a related set of research issues." [A preprint of this paper can be accessed from CiteSeer.IST.]

A Day in the Life of... Douglas Hofstadter. Crossroads (Winter 2003 - 10.2). "What I work on: Various things. My graduate students and I have worked for many years on developing computer models of how human thinking works, and since I believe very deeply that abstraction (also called "high-level perception") and analogy-making constitute the core and the essence of thinking, that's what we've always focused on. Over the years, we have designed and implemented quite a number of computer models -- Copycat, Metacat, and Letter Spirit among them -- that discover creative analogies in various microdomains."

• Visit the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, "(aka the Fluid Analogies Research Group, or simply FARG) is an interdisciplinary center for research in cognitive science, directed by Douglas Hofstadter. CRCC is affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program at IU, and has close ties with the Computer Science Department. CRCC research focuses mainly on emergent computational models of creative analogical thinking and its subcognitive substrate -- namely, fluid concepts."
• Read More About Mitchell's Copycat Program Copycat Tutorial
• Read about his February 2006 Stanford Presidential Lecture, Analogy as Core, Core as Analogy, and then see the lecture resource collection for his chapter, Analogy as the Core of Cognition, previously published in The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (2001).
  • Also see this article about the lecture: Noted cognitive scientist asserts that analogy is (almost) the whole enchilada. By Barbara Palmer. The Stanford Report (February 16, 2006). "Far from being a subset associated with problem solving -- a tiny 'Delaware on the map of cognition' -- or a special variety of reasoning, analogy is the main event, Hofstadter asserted during an evening lecture Feb. 6 and during a discussion the following afternoon at the Humanities Center."

AI and Similarity. By Edwina L. Rissland. IEEE Intelligent Systems (May/June 2006) 21(3): 39-49. "For AI to become truly robust, we must further our understanding of similarity-driven reasoning, analogy, learning, and explanation. Here are some suggested research directions."

Also see: Case-Based Reasoning