From: kempson@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU (Mark Kempson)
Newsgroups: ucb.icsi,ucb.cs.msgs,ba.seminars,ucb.seminars
Subject: 8/27/92 Melanie Mitchell Talk at ICSI
Date: 18 Aug 1992 19:47:59 GMT
Organization: International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.
NNTP-Posting-Host: icsia.icsi.berkeley.edu
Originator: kempson@icsia


              The International Computer Science Institute
                     is pleased to present a talk:

                  Thursday, August 27, 1992  2:00 p.m.

                            MELANIE MITCHELL
                           Santa Fe Institute

               ``Modeling Analogy-Making as Perception''

           Analogy-making is generally acknowledged to be  central
      and  ubiquitous  in thought.  However, in the cognitive sci-
      ence community, analogy-making has most often  been  modeled
      as  a  high-level,  goal-driven reasoning process -- a ``big
      gun'' for problem solving, to be invoked when a problem can-
      not be solved in a conventional way.

           In this talk I will argue that the ``analogy-making  as
      reasoning'' approach does not address the most important and
      central  aspects  of  analogy-making.   I  will  argue  that
      instead,  we  must model analogy-making as a form of ``high-
      level perception'' -- a result of the same mental mechanisms
      underlying categorization, recognition, reminding, and other
      unconscious  perceptual  activities.   This  view   requires
      models  of  analogy-making  to  focus on the ``fluidity'' of
      concepts -- their overlapping and associative nature,  their
      blurry  boundaries,  their dynamic and graded relevance in a
      given  situation,  their  flexibility  as  a   function   of
      context---in short, their fluid rather than rigid adaptabil-
      ity to different situations.  Such fluidity is a hallmark of
      human thought and its source is not well understood.

           To illustrate these arguments, I will describe  ``Copy-
      cat'',  a  computer  program developed by myself and Douglas
      Hofstadter, which models the  mental  mechanisms  underlying
      fluid  concepts  and analogy-making.  Copycat creates analo-
      gies  between  idealized  situations  involving  strings  of
      letters.   Analogy-making  in  this stripped-down, seemingly
      simple domain requires many of the same abilities humans use
      to  understand  and  to make analogies between more complex,
      real-world situations.

           Copycat's architecture is neither symbolic nor  connec-
      tionist,  but  occupies  an unique intermediate level in the
      spectrum of cognitive models.  The claim  of  our  model  is
      that  this  level is at present the most appropriate one for
      understanding human concepts and analogy-making.


        This talk will be held in the Main Lecture Hall at ICSI.
          1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley, CA 94704
       (On Center between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way)

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