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08 Feb The Power of Inference

Joe Roushar – February 2024 Sense Perception and Cognition What can you infer about the things in this picture: Our senses are constantly feeding information to our brains, but how much can we trust? Inference is guesswork performed by the frontal cortex based on circuitous electrical signal pathways from the sensory parts of the brain, […]

23 Feb Inference in Knowledge Apps

Thinking Process

In Section 5 we discussed different kinds of knowledge, including existential or hierarchical knowledge and causal knowledge. In Section 7 we discussed modeling approaches and search techniques that could be applied to any kind of knowledge. We saw that causal knowledge can be modeled as chains of causes and effects, and that existential knowledge can be […]

25 Mar Generalization and Inference

Chicago Drawbridge

What do you do when you encounter something completely new, such as a new flavor. Can you identify that it is a flavor and that it resembles some flavors you’ve encountered before? If you knew about bridges from experience, but had never seen a drawbridge, or a lift bridge or a covered bridge, would you be able […]

12 Nov Context Powers Backward Chaining Logic

Forward Chaining Rules

A popular success strategies book suggests that if we “Begin with the End in Mind” we are likely to get where we’re going more consistently. We wander less if we think about what we want at the end from the very first steps of our journeys. Context helps us do that. Human behaviorists and philosophers have […]