ITR---Reinventing Artificial Intelligence

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Genesis Group of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is working on a computational theory of human intelligence. Their work is grounded in two key assumptions: first, that humans think with their language, vision, and motor systems, and their interaction; and second that humans can think abstractly because they can build on a foundation of thinking about concrete events in the physical world. Their plan includes the development of a testbed that features paths, agents, causes, both language and visual inputs and outputs, complex state transitions, and support for abstract reasoning in abstract worlds. They propose to exploit both symbolic and nonsymbolic representations. The symbolic representations will include a representation for describing the movement of animals and artifacts along trajectories and a representation for describing state transitions in terms of a vocabulary of qualitative changes. The nonsymbolic representations will include memory traces lying close to experienced sensory inputs. The Genesis Group expects success to lead not only to a better understanding of natural intelligence buy also, in the long term, to important practical results, such as computer applications with genuine commonsense and educational applications that exploit an understanding of how best to engage human linguistic and visual problem solving faculties.