--Henry David Thoreau
"One good analogy is worth three hours discussion."
--James McCay
On page 63 of Hofstadter's book, he makes some bold claims about what intelligence is. Although he does not lay out the details exactly, he does go on to say he knows that, "analogy-making lies at the heart of of pattern perception and extrapolation." He continues with, "pattern-finding is the core of intelligence" and therefore, "analogy-making lies at the heart of intelligence."
His conclusions about intelligence amuse me. Although he may be making a very good point, it is still interesting that what he claims are central to intelligence are the topics he's most interested in and, as it seems to me so far, appears to excel at. However, I do agree that pattern-finding and analogy-making can be an important factors when determining intelligence. Perhaps because of that, it is also intriguing to me that he states these simple ideas haven't been studied much and that analogy-making is often referred to as "a specialized, isolated 'tool'."
After doing some research into the topic of the importance of analogy-making, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed by a wave of books and scholarly articles. Also, many of the articles I did peruse referenced Hofstadter in some way. I found quite a bit on analogy and natural language, although I was expecting to find significantly more. It was also surprising to find that many of the links I did uncover involved a look into cognitive science.
Hofstadter's arguments make terrific sense to me and after reading it, it seemed so obvious. Analogy is using what you've already learned in some context and applying it to another. This just seems so apparent! Maximize your learning by applying it wherever you can, then learn something new from that experience to apply elsewhere in the future and so on. This concept is astounding in its simplicity and shocking that it isn't being more widely studied.
Here is an informative and straightforward powerpoint article detailing four analogy-making systems, including Hofstadter and Mitchell's Copycat program:
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/ArtificialIntelligenceFall2008/Slides11-12-2008.pdf
Here is a short article discussing some interesting points of analogy:
http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/LEAD/people/french/analogy.tics.pdf
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