CIS 5590.004. Artificial General Intelligence

Symbol and Abstract Reasoning

1. Symbol and Language

Difference between Symbolic and Connectionist AI

• Local vs. distributed representation, rules vs. functions
• What a symbol stand for: "Physical Symbol System Hypothesis", "Chinese room"
• Multiple interpretations: "symbol grounding" vs. "variable binding"

• Language as second-signal system
• Language of Thought Hypothesis
• Language and thought are not the same thing

2. Reasoning and Mathematics

• Symbols and variables in reasoning system, Unification
• Combinatorial explosion and control strategy

• Pólya's heuristics
• "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"

3. Reasoning and Natural Language

Statistical school in NLP: correlation patterns in actual usage

• Large language model: predicting the next token
• Natural Language Inference: judging the logical relation between texts

• Different "symbols": nouns vs. pronouns
• Linguistic relativity
• Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence

4. Reasoning in NAL-6

• Variable terms and substitution
• Abstract terms and interpretation
• Reasoning in and out of a subsystem
• Linguistic terms as symbols
• Translation as substitution

Reading

• Non-Axiomatic Logic: A Model of Intelligent Reasoning, 2nd Edition, Chapter 10