Commonsense reasoning

Commonsense reasoning is the branch of Artificial intelligence concerned with replicating human thinking. There are several components to this problem, including:

• Developing adequately broad and deep commonsense knowledge bases.
• Developing reasoning methods that exhibit the features of human thinking, including the ability to:
  • reason with knowledge that is true by default
  • reason rapidly across a broad range of domains
  • tolerate uncertainty in your knowledge
  • take decisions under incomplete knowledge and perhaps revise that belief or decision when complete knowledge becomes available.
• Developing new kinds of cognitive architectures that support multiple reasoning methods and representations.

Prominent Researchers and Individuals Involved

• Marvin Minsky
• John McCarthy
• Erik Mueller
• Doug Lenat
• Lenhart Schubert

Common Sense Problems

Formalizing the commonsense knowledge needed for even simple reasoning problems is a huge undertaking. For this reason, researchers often study small toy problems, such as planning in the blocks world domain. Because such toy problems can gloss over some of the more interesting research issues, there has been a recent trend toward working on more realistic challenge problems. Common Sense Problems

Schools of thought

Prof. John McCarthy believes in formal logic approach to common sense reasoning. Prof. Marvin Minsky takes an approach illustrated in The Society of Mind and in The Emotion Machine.

See also

• Cyc
• Open Mind Common Sense
• MindPixel
• ConceptNet

References

• Minsky, Marvin (1988). The Society of Mind.
• Davis, Ernest (1990). Representations of Commonsense Knowledge. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 1-55860-033-7.
• McCarthy, John (1990). Formalizing Common Sense. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. ISBN 1-871516-49-8.
• Minsky, Marvin (2006). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-7663-9.
• Mueller, Erik T. (2006) Commonsense Reasoning. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 0-12-369388-8.

External links

• Commonsense Reasoning Web Site
• Commonsense Reasoning Problem Page
• Media Lab Commonsense Computing Initiative
• The Epilog project at the University of Rochester
• Review of Commonsense Reasoning