Consider the problem of learning input/output mappings through exploration, e.g.

Gentner and Markman (1992) suggested that the ability to deal with analogy will be a "Watershed or Waterloo" for connectionist models. They identified "structural alignment" as the central aspect of analogy making. They noted the apparent ease with which people can perform structural alignment in a wide variety of tasks and were pessimistic about the of a distributed connectionist model that could be useful inprospects for the development performing structural alignment. In this paper I describe how Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) (Plate, 1991; Plate, 1994), a fixed-width distributed representation for nested structures, can be used to obtain fast estimates of analogical similarity.

A Guided Tour of Computer Vision: A Review

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp -- A Review

The 1994 Florida AI Research Symposium was held 5-7 May at Pensacola Beach, Florida. This symposium brought together researchers and practitioners in AI, cognitive science, and allied disciplines to discuss timely topics, cutting-edge research, and system development efforts in areas spanning the entire AI field. Symposium highlights included Pat Hayes's comparison of the history of AI to the history of powered flight and Clark Glymour's discussion of the prehistory of AI.

The Workshop on Comparative Analysis of AI Planning Systems, held during the 1994 national AI conference, was lively and interesting. Both the theoretical and practical sides of the AI planning community were represented. Several papers contributed to the theoretical analysis of planning algorithms, and others showed the first steps toward convergence between such theoretical work and practical work on the system engineering aspects of working planners.

The 1993 International Logic Programming Symposium was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 26-29 October. It presented the state of the art in logic programming, emphasizing the deliberate interaction with other fields, in particular, humanistic fields. Topics covered at the symposium included algorithmic analysis, programming methodologies, semantic analysis, deductive databases, and programming language design.

The Third International Workshop on Human and Machine Cognition was held in Seaside, Florida, on 13-15 May 1993. Each paper session included presentations on cognitive research, educational research, AI theory and logic, and particular knowledge engineering projects. This mixture encouraged the participants from diverse disciplines to listen and respond to one another. These international workshops are held to allow leading scientists, scholars, and practitioners to discuss current issues and research in particular topics in AI and cognitive science.

To assess the state of the art and identify issues requiring further investigation, a workshop on qualitative and abstract probability was held during the third week of November 1993. This workshop brought together a mix of active researchers from academia, industry, and government interested in the practical and theoretical impact of these abstractions on techniques, methods, and tools for solving complex AI tasks. The result was a set of specific recommendations on the most promising and important avenues for future research.