Douglas Hofstadter at Indiana University built several programs such as Jumbo (1983), Numbo (1987) and Copycat (1988) that reacted against the notion that intelligence could be just the product of domain knowledge.
He believed that finding patterns constituted the core of intelligence and therefore researched a more abstract type of intelligence, capable of discovering patterns and shaping concepts out of patterns.
He implicitly viewed mathematics as the supreme demonstration of human intelligence because mathematicians continuously discover higher and higher levels of abstraction to explain the patterns that they discover.
Hofstadter's programs tried to simulate how we build concepts, expand them, adapt them.
Concepts are dynamic, not static, or, better, concepts are fluid.
He viewed intelligence as the product of pattern perception, extrapolation and generalization; and focused on the mental operations that allow us to build a generalization, for example analogy and the esthetic sense.
These programs were meant to investigate how humans come up with creative solutions to problems and how humans develop new scientific theories. TM, ®, Copyright © 2017 Piero Scaruffi |