Crowdsourcing may have just helped close the "analogy gap" for computers ZDNet

To paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer, genius is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no one else has thought. Put another way, genius is breaking down the usual silos that isolate ideas and knowledge into specific fields and purviews. Thanks to work about to be presented by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it may soon apply to AI. The researchers have just given computers the capacity to mine patent databases and other research records in order to repurpose old ideas to solve new problems. To do it, they had to devise a method to teach computers to make analogies.