If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

Much Learning is done by way of studying precedents and exercises. A teacher supplies a story, gives a problem, and expects a student both to solve a problem and to discover a principle. The student must find the correspondence between…

There are many situations in which a very detailed low-level description encodes, through a hierarchical organization, a recognizable higher-order pattern. The macro-molecular structural conformations of proteins exhibit higher order regularities whose recognition is complicated by many factors. ARIADNE searches for…

It is obvious to anyone familiar with the rules of the game of chess that a king on an empty board can reach every square. It is true, but not obvious, that a knight can reach every square. Why is…

This paper presents a novel algorithm for learning in a class of stochastic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces that trades speed for accuracy. A transform of the stochastic MDP into a deterministic one is presented…

We had previously shown that regularization principles lead to approximation schemes, as Radial Basis Functions, which are equivalent to networks with one layer of hidden units, called Regularization Networks. In this paper we show that regularization networks encompass a much…

This memo describes PROGRAMMER, a parser for natural language. It consists of a language for writing grammars in the form of programs, and an interpreter which can use these grammars to parse sentence. PROGRAMMER is one part of an integrated…

Compliant control is a standard method for performing fine manipulation tasks, like grasping and assembly, but it requires estimation of the state of contact between the robot arm and the objects involved. Here we present a method to learn a…

What are the characteristics of the process by which an intent is transformed into a plan and then a program? How is a program debugged? This paper analyzes these questions in the context of understanding simple turtle programs. To understand…

A method will be described for finding the shape of a smooth apaque object form a monocular image, given a knowledge of the surface photometry, the position of the lightsource and certain auxiliary information to resolve ambiguities. This method is…