Learning to use analogies

  • Authors:

  • John McDermott

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'79 Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1979

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Abstract

In order for a system to learn how to do new tasks, it must be capable of assimilation and accommodation. The assimilation capability enables a system to relate unfamiliar situations to situations that it knows about. Through assimilation, an unfamiliar situation is transformed, for a time, into a familiar situation. The accommodation capability enables a system to make such transformations permanent. ANA, the system described in this paper, is a production system that is capable of both assimilation and accommodation. Initially, ANA has a few methods for accomplishing a variety of simple tasks. When it is given a not too unfamiliar task, it performs that task by analogy with one of the tasks it has a method for. When it accomplishes a new task (and typically this happens only after the method has been extended to handle problems that it was not designed to cope with), it stores the knowledge of how it did the task. If ANA is subsequently faced with the same task, it recognizes the task and performs it using the knowledge previously gained.