DAY 9 - Thinking Humanly: The cognitive modeling approach - Artificial Intelligence - IT Consultant - SAP, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

We have briefly discussed the cognitive modeling approaches in one of my previous posts. It gave an introduction to the Four Main Approaches to Artificial Intelligence.

In this post, we will take a closer look at the first quadrant on the left top corner “Thinking Humanly:

Thinking humanly is to make a system or program to think like a human. But to achieve that, we need to know how does a human thinks.

Suppose if we ask a person to explain how his brain connects different things during the thinking process, he/she will probably close both eyes and will start to check how he/she thinks but he/she cannot explain or interpret the process.

Ask the same question to yourself, and most likely you will have the same pattern and will end up saying “you do not know, or you may say something like “I am thinking through my mind”, but you cannot express more than that. Read through neuroscience books to get a deeper understanding of this.

For example – If we want to model the thinking of Roger Federer and make the model system to compete with someone or against him to play in a tennis game, it may not be possible to replicate the exact thinking as Roger Federer, however, a good build of Intelligence systems (Robot) can play and win the game against him.

To understand the exact process of how we think, we need to go inside the human mind to see how this giant machine works.

We can interpret how the human mind thinks in theory, in three ways as follows:

Introspection method – Catch our thoughts and see how it flows.
Psychological Inspections method – Observe a person on the action.
Brain Imaging method (MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) or fMRI (Functional Magnetic resonance imaging) scanning) – Observe a person’s brain in action.

Using the above methods, if we are able to catch the human brain’s actions and give it as a theory, then we can convert that theory into a computer program. If the input/output of the computer program matches with human behavior, then it may be possible that a part of the program may be behaving like a human brain.

This could be explained with the famous problem-solving example:

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon developed the General Problem Solver (GPS) program to model human thinking and check whether it can solve problems like a person by following the same reasoning steps as a human. The intent of the program is not just to solve the problem correctly but to go through the same series of steps as that of a human brain to solve it.

Thinking human goal is to develop modern computational models and intelligent devices to think like a human and those models help humans to solve complex problems.