Description - The Subtlety of Sameness by Robert M. French
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 programme called Tabletop forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects on a table set for a meal. The theory and the programme rely on the idea that myriad stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to a statistical robustness on a macrolevel.
To illustrate this, French includes the results of thousands of runs of his programme on several dozen interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld. French's work not only reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness but also offers a computational model of mechanisms underlying these processes. This model makes strides in putting into practice microlevel stochastic processing, distributed processing, simulated parallelism, and the integration of representation-building and representation-processing.
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