"Analogy-based reasoning: This term is sometimes used, as a synonym to case-based reasoning, to describe the typical case-based approach... However, it is also often used to characterize methods that solve new problems based on past cases from a different domain, while typical case-based methods focus on indexing and matching strategies for single-domain cases." -A. Aamodt and E. Plaza

Structure-Mapping. From the Qualitative Reasoning Group at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences. "The basic idea of Gentner's structure-mapping theory is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target) which conveys that a system of relations which holds among the base objects also holds among the target objects. Thus an analogy is a way of noticing relational commonalties independently of the objects in which those relations are embedded. ... We view structure-mapping as the mechanism by which much of experiential learning takes place. We conjecture that much of experiential learning is driven by implicit comparisons among a person's knowledge structures at a given time. Analogy is also crucial in learning from instruction and in aligning experiential knowledge with knowledge gained via instruction."

A veritable cognitive mind. By R. Colin Johnson EE Times (July 28, 2003). " Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI's founding father, says today's artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the 'big' AI problem. Indeed, according to Minsky, the missing element is something so big that we can't see it: common sense. 'To me the problem is how to get common sense into computers,' said Minsky. 'And part of that, it seems to me, is not how to solve any particular problem but how to quickly think of a new way to solve it-perhaps through a change in emotional state-when the usual method doesn't work.' In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context of discovering that missing cognitive glue. ... Reasoning by analogy is a way of adapting old knowledge, which almost never perfectly matches the present situation, by following a recipe of detecting differences and tweaking parameters. It all happens so quickly that no 'thinking' seems to be involved."

T. G. Evans 'I.Q. test' solver: ANALOGY. From Professor S. Simon Ben-Avi. "Varieties of analogical thinking depend on the intelligent comparison of descriptions of the things between which an analogy is perceived. This point was first clearly made within the artificial intelligence literature by T. G. Evans, whose ANALOGY program could appreciate structural likenesses between geometrical patterns of the type commonly included in IQ tests. Presented with a set of items such as those shown in Figure 1, Evans's program uses descriptions, and descriptions of descriptions , to search for deeper similarities underlying surface disparities. For example, ANALOGY concludes in answer to this particular test problem that 'A is to B as C is to 2.'"

Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues, Methodological Variations, and System Approaches. By A. Aamodt and E. Plaza. (1994) Artificial Intelligence Communications, IOS Press, Vol. 7:1, pp. 39 - 59.

Exploiting Domain Geometry in Analogical Route Planning. K.Z. Haigh, J.R. Shewchuk, and M.M. Veloso Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, No. 9, September, 1997, pp. 509 - 541. "Automated route planning consists of using real maps to automatically find good map routes. ... Analogical reasoning is a method of using past experience to improve problem solving performance in similar new situations. Our approach consists of the accumulation and reuse of previously traversed routes."

Design, Analogy, and Creativity. By Ashok K. Goel. IEEE Expert/Intelligent Systems & Their Applications, Vol. 12, No.3, May-June 1997. "Analogical reasoning appears to play a key role in creative design. This article briefly reviews recent AI research on analogy-based creative design before enumerating a related set of research issues."

A Day in the Life of... Douglas Hofstadter. Crossroads (Winter 2003 - 10.2). "What I work on: Various things. My graduate students and I have worked for many years on developing computer models of how human thinking works, and since I believe very deeply that abstraction (also called "high-level perception") and analogy-making constitute the core and the essence of thinking, that's what we've always focused on. Over the years, we have designed and implemented quite a number of computer models -- Copycat, Metacat, and Letter Spirit among them -- that discover creative analogies in various microdomains."

• Visit the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, "an interdisciplinary center for research in cognitive science, directed by Douglas Hofstadter. CRCC is affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program at IU, and has close ties with the Computer Science Department. CRCC research focuses mainly on emergent computational models of creative analogical thinking and its subcognitive substrate -- namely, fluid concepts."

"Reuse of OO Specifications through Analogy. The ROSA project at the Department of Information Science [University of Bergen, Norway], focuses on themes from information systems development, object-orientation, and artificial intelligence. The purpose of the project is to investigate how one could us analogical reasoning as a method to support systems development. That is, we try to facilitate reuse in the analysis phase of the software engineering process by establishing analogies from a present case to finished analysis models."

Legal Principles and Analogical Reasoning. By Michael Aikenhead (1997). Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law: Poster Proceedings, 1-10. Excerpt from the extended abstract: "Any complete model of legal reasoning and legal analogizing must simulate the manner in which principles influence the creation of analogies and the way in which principles are themselves tested and refined on a case by case basis. The influence of principles on the construction of analogies, not only the influence of principles on the justification of analogies needs to be incorporated into simulations of legal analogizing."

• for related info, see: our Architecture & Design page

Analogy and Conceptual Change, or You can't step into the same mind twice. By Eric Dietrich - Program in Philosophy, Computers, and Cognitive Science, Binghamton University. (In Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual and Representational Change In Humans and Machines E. Dietrich and A. Markman, eds., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000, pp. 265-294)

The Metaphor Home Page. "This site is the home of all things good and bad concerning the computational treatment of Metaphor Interpretation, Generation and Analogical Reasoning." Maintained by Tony Veale.

Redefining what artificial intelligence is all about. Alexandre Linhares' review (February 17, 2000) of Melanie Mitchell's book "Analogy-making As Perception." "It documents an artificial intelligence project known as Copycat, which was implemented as the author's PhD project under Douglas Hofstadter."

ALSO SEE: CASE-BASED REASONING