The Right Way
Name
2012AICS.pdf
Size
1.72 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
816612870156042f28778129f8ecfb82
Author(s)
Winston, Patrick Henry
Date Issued
July 2012
Journal
Advances in Cognitive Systems
Publisher
Cognitive Systems Foundation
Citation
Winston, Patrick Henry. "The Right Way." in Advances in Cognitive Systems. Volume 1 (July to December 2012).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
I ask why humans are smarter than other primates, and I hypothesize that an important part of
the answer lies in the Inner Language Hypothesis, a prerequisite to what I call the Strong Story
Hypothesis, which holds that story telling and understanding have a central role in human intelligence.
Next, I introduce the Directed Perception Hypothesis, which holds that we derive much of
our common sense, including the common sense required in story understanding, by deploying our
perceptual apparatus on real and imagined events. Both the Strong Story Hypothesis and the Directed
Perception Hypothesis become more valuable in light of our social nature, an idea captured
in the Social Animal Hypothesis. Then, after discussing methodology, I describe the representations
and methods embodied in Genesis, a story-understanding system that analyzes stories ranging from
pr´ecis of Shakespeare’s plots to descriptions of conflicts in cyberspace. Genesis works with short
story summaries, provided in English, together with low-level common-sense rules and higher-level
concept patterns, likewise expressed in English. Using only a small collection of common-sense
rules and concept patterns, Genesis demonstrates several story-understanding capabilities, such
as determining that both Macbeth and the 2007 Russia-Estonia Cyberwar involve revenge, even
though neither the word revenge nor any of its synonyms are mentioned.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
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Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://cogsys.org/pdf/paper-1-4.pdf
