AI driven with Analogies

We Followed Melanie Mitchell's work, Especially with regard to Analogies. A Good direction,  working with advertising we liked the idea of their use, but the approaches was not mature enough, in particular natural language methods had not emerged yet.  Would like to see where this has gone since.

The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies   By Joe Pavlus in Quanta Mag

Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

he Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired legions of computer scientists in 1979, but few were as inspired as Melanie Mitchell. After reading the 777-page tome, Mitchell, a high school math teacher in New York, decided she “needed to be” in artificial intelligence. She soon tracked down the book’s author, AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter, and talked him into giving her an internship. She had only taken a handful of computer science courses at the time, but he seemed impressed with her chutzpah and unconcerned about her academic credentials.

 Mitchell prepared a “last-minute” graduate school application and joined Hofstadter’s new lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The two spent the next six years collaborating closely on Copycat,   a computer program which, in the words of its co-creators, was designed to “discover insightful analogies, and to do so in a psychologically realistic way.”

The analogies Copycat came up with were between simple patterns of letters, akin to the analogies on standardized tests. One example: “If the string ‘abc’ changes to the string ‘abd,’ what does the string ‘pqrs’ change to?” Hofstadter and Mitchell believed that understanding the cognitive process of analogy — how human beings make abstract connections between similar ideas, perceptions and experiences — would be crucial to unlocking humanlike artificial intelligence.

Mitchell maintains that analogy can go much deeper than exam-style pattern matching. “It’s understanding the essence of a situation by mapping it to another situation that is already understood,” she said. “If you tell me a story and I say, ‘Oh, the same thing happened to me,’ literally the same thing did not happen to me that happened to you, but I can make a mapping that makes it seem very analogous. It’s something that we humans do all the time without even realizing we’re doing it. We’re swimming in this sea of analogies constantly.” ...'