Making Computers Reason and Learn by Analogy

Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas. Previous models of analogy, including prior versions of SME, have not been able to scale to the size of representations that people tend to use. Forbus's new version of SME can handle the size and complexity of relational representations that are needed for visual reasoning, cracking textbook problems, and solving moral dilemmas. To encourage research on analogy, Forbus's team is releasing the SME source code and a 5,000-example corpus, which includes comparisons drawn from visual problem solving, textbook problem solving, and moral decision making.