10/28/2019 Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence - - -Marvin Minsky

STEPS TOWARD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Marvin Minsky

Dept. of Mathematics, MIT

Research Lab. of Electronics, MIT.
Member, IRE

Received by the IRE, October 24, 1960. The author's work summarized
here—which was done at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a center for
research operated by MIT at Lexington, Mass., with the joint Support of
the U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force under Air Force Contract AF
19(604)-5200; and at the Res. Lab. of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.,
which is supported in part by the U. S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research, and the ONR—is based on earlier work done
by the author as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard
University.

The work toward attaining "artificial intelligence'' is the center of

considerable computer research, design, and application. The field is in its
starting transient, characterized by many varied and independent efforts.
Marvin Minsky has been requested to draw this work together into a
coherent summary, supplement it with appropriate explanatory or
theoretical noncomputer information, and introduce his assessment of the
state of the art. This paper emphasizes the class of activities in which a
general-purpose computer, complete with a library of basic programs, is
further programmed to perform operations leading to ever higher-level
information processing functions such as learning and problem solving.
This informative article will be of real interest to both the general
Proceedings reader and the computer specialist. -- The Guest Editor.

Summary: The problems of heuristic programming—of making computers

solve really difficult problems—are divided into five main areas: Search,
Pattern-Recognition, Learning, Planning, and Induction. Wherever
appropriate, the discussion is supported by extensive citation of the
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literature and by descriptions of a few of the most successful heuristic

(problem-solving) programs constructed to date.

The adjective "heuristic," as used here and widely in the literature, means
related to improving problem-solving performance; as a noun it is also
used in regard to any method or trick used to improve the efficiency of a
problem-solving system. A "heuristic program," to be considered
successful, must work well on a variety of problems, and may often be
excused if it fails on some. We often find it worthwhile to introduce a
heuristic method, which happens to cause occasional failures, if there is an
over-all improvement in performance. But imperfect methods are not
necessarily heuristic, nor vice versa. Hence "heuristic" should not be
regarded as opposite to "foolproof"; this has caused some confusion in the
literature.

INTRODUCTION

A VISITOR to our planet might be puzzled about the role of computers in

our technology. On the one hand, he would read and hear all about
wonderful "mechanical brains" baffling their creators with prodigious
intellectual performance. And he (or it) would be warned that these
machines must be restrained, lest they overwhelm us by might, persuasion,
or even by the revelation of truths too terrible to be borne. On the other
hand, our visitor would find the machines being denounced on all sides for
their slavish obedience, unimaginative literal interpretations, and
incapacity for innovation or initiative; in short, for their inhuman dullness.

Our visitor might remain puzzled if he set out to find, and judge for
himself, these monsters. For he would find only a few machines mostly
general-purpose computers), programmed for the moment to behave
according to some specification) doing things that might claim any real
intellectual status. Some would be proving mathematical theorems of
rather undistinguished character. A few machines might be playing certain
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games, occasionally defeating their designers. Some might be

distinguishing between hand-printed letters. Is this enough to justify so
much interest, let alone deep concern? I believe that it is; that we are on the
threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly
dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines. But our purpose is
not to guess about what the future may bring; it is only to try to describe
and explain what seem now to be our first steps toward the construction of
"artificial intelligence."

Along with the development of general-purpose computers, the past few

years have seen an increase in effort toward the discovery and
mechanization of problem-solving processes. Quite a number of papers
have appeared describing theories or actual computer programs concerned
with game-playing, theorem-proving, pattern-recognition, and other
domains which would seem to require some intelligence. The literature
does not include any general discussion of the outstanding problems of this
field.

In this article, an attempt will be made to separate out, analyze, and find the
relations between some of these problems. Analysis will be supported with
enough examples from the literature to serve the introductory function of a
review article, but there remains much relevant work not described here.
This paper is highly compressed, and therefore, cannot begin to discuss all
these matters in the available space.

There is, of course, no generally accepted theory of "intelligence"; the

analysis is our own and may be controversial. We regret that we cannot
give full personal acknowledgments here—suffice it to say that we have
discussed these matters with almost every one of the cited authors.

It is convenient to divide the problems into five main areas: Search,

Pattern-Recognition Learning, Planning, and Induction these comprise the
main divisions of the paper. Let us summarize the entire argument very
briefly:

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A computer can do, in a sense, only what it is told to do. But even when we
do not know exactly how to solve a certain problem, we may program a
machine to Search through some large space of solution attempts.
Unfortunately, when we write a straightforward program for such a search,
we usually find the resulting process to be enormously inefficient. With
Pattern- Recognition techniques, efficiency can be greatly improved by
restricting the machine to use its methods only on the kind of attempts for
which they are appropriate. And with Learning, efficiency is further
improved by directing Search in accord with earlier experiences. By
actually analyzing the situation, using what we call Planning methods, the
machine may obtain a fundamental improvement by replacing the
originally given Search by a much smaller, more appropriate exploration.
Finally, in the section on Induction, we consider some rather more global
concepts of how one might obtain intelligent machine behavior.
I. THE PROBLEM OF SEARCH
Summary—If, for a given problem, we have a means for checking a
proposed solution, then we can solve the problem by testing all possible
answers. But this always takes much too long to be of practical interest.
Any device that can reduce this search may be of value. If we can detect
relative improvement, then “hill-climbing” (Section l-B) may be feasible,
but its use requires some structural knowledge of the search space. And
unless this structure meets certain conditions, hill-climbing may do more
harm than good.

Note 1: The adjective "heuristic," as used here and widely in the literature,
means related to improving problem-solving performance; as a noun it is
also used in regard to any method or trick used to improve the efficiency of
a problem-solving system. A "heuristic program," to be considered
successful, must work well on a variety of problems, and may often be
excused if it fails on some. We often find it worthwhile to introduce a
heuristic method, which happens to cause occasional failures, if there is an
over-all improvement in performance. But imperfect methods are not
necessarily heuristic, nor vice versa. Hence "heuristic" should not be
regarded as opposite to "foolproof"; this has caused some confusion in the
literature.
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When we talk of problem solving in what follows, we will usually suppose

that all the problems to be solved are initially well-defined. [1] By this we
mean that with each problem we are given some systematic way to decide
when a proposed solution is acceptable. Most of the experimental work
discussed here is concerned with such well-defined problems as are met in
theorem proving or in games with precise rules for play and scoring.

In one sense, all such problems are trivial. For if there exists a solution to
such a problem, that solution can be found eventually by any blind
exhaustive process which searches through all possibilities. And it is
usually not difficult to mechanize or program such a search.

But for any problem worthy of the name, the search through all
possibilities will be too inefficient for practical use. And on the other hand,
systems like chess, or nontrivial parts of mathematics, are too complicated
for complete analysis. Without complete analysis, there must always
remain some core of search, or “trial and error.” So we need to find
techniques through which the results of incomplete analysis can be used to
make the search more efficient. The necessity for this is simply
overwhelming. A search of all the paths through the game of checkers
involves some 10**40 move choices [2]—in chess, some 10**120 [3]. If
we organized all the particles in our galaxy into some kind of parallel
computer operating at the frequency of hard cosmic rays, the latter
computation would still take impossibly long; we cannot expect
improvements in “hardware” alone to solve all our problems. Certainly, we
must use whatever we know in advance to guide the trial generator. And
we must also be able to make use of results obtained along the way.

Notes: McCarthy [1] has discussed the enumeration problem from a

recursive-function-theory point of view. This incomplete but suggestive
paper proposes, among other things, that "the enumeration of partial
recursive functions should give an early place to compositions of functions
that have already appeared.” I regard this as an important notion,
especially in the light of Shannon's results [4] on two-terminal switching
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circuits—that the "average" n-variable switching function requires about

2**n contacts. This disaster does not usually strike when we construct
"interesting" large machines, presumably because they are based on
composition of functions already found useful. In [5] and especially in [6]
Ashby has an excellent discussion of the search problem. (However, I am
not convinced of the usefulness of his notion of "ultrastability," which
seems to be little more than the property of a machine to search until
something stops it.

A. Relative Improvement, Hill-Climbing, and Heuristic Connections

A problem can hardly come to interest us if we have no background of

information about it. We usually have some basis, however flimsy, for
detecting improvement; some trials will be judged more successful than
others. Suppose, for example, that we have a comparator which selects as
the better, one from any pair of trial outcomes. Now the comparator
cannot, alone, serve to make a problem well-defined. No goal is defined.
But if the comparator-defined relation between trials is “transitive” (i.e., if
A dominates B and B dominates C implies that A dominates C), then we
can at least define “progress,” and ask our machine, given a time limit, to
do the best it can.

But it is essential to observe that a comparator by itself, however shrewd,

cannot alone give any improvement over exhaustive search. The
comparator gives us information about partial success, to be sure. But we
need also some way of using this information to direct the pattern of search
in promising directions; to select new trial points which are in some sense
“like,” or “similar to,” or “in the same direction as” those which have given
the best previous results. To do this we need some additional structure on
the search space. This structure need not bear much resemblance to the
ordinary spatial notion of direction, or that of distance, but it must
somehow tie together points which are heuristically related.

We will call such a structure a heuristic connection. We introduce this term

for informal use only—which is why our definition is itself so informal.
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But we need it. Many publications have been marred by the misuse, for this
purpose, of precise mathematical terms, e.g., metric and topological. The
term “connection,” with its variety of dictionary meanings, seems just the
word to designate a relation without commitment as to the exact nature of
the relation. An important and simple kind of heuristic connection is that
defined when a space has coordinates (or parameters) and there is also
defined a numerical “success function” E which is a reasonably smooth
function of the coordinates. Here we can use local optimization or hill-
climbing methods.

B. Hill-Climbing

Suppose that we are given a black-box machine with inputs x1, . . . xn and
an output E(x1, … xn). We wish to maximize E by adjusting the input
values. But we are not given any mathematical description of the function
E; hence, we cannot use differentiation or related methods. The obvious
approach is to explore locally about a point, finding the direction of
steepest ascent. One moves a certain distance in that direction and repeats
the process until improvement ceases. If the hill is smooth, this may be
done, approximately, by estimating the gradient component dE/dxi
separately for each coordinate. There are more sophisticated approaches—
one may use noise added to each variable, and correlate the output with
each input (see below)—but this is the general idea. It is a fundamental
technique, and we see it always in the background of far more complex
systems. Heuristically, its great virtue is this: the sampling effort (for
determining the direction of the gradient) grows, in a sense, only linearly
with the number of parameters. So if we can solve, by such a method, a
certain kind of problem involving many parameters, then the addition of
more parameters of the same kind ought not to cause an inordinate increase
in difficulty. We are particularly interested in problem-solving methods that
can be so extended to more problems that are difficult. Alas, most
interesting systems, which involve combinational operations usually, grow
exponentially more difficult as we add variables.

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Multiple simultaneous optimizers search for a (local) maximum value of

some function E (x1, … xn) of several parameters. Each unit Ui
independently "jitters" its parameter x, perhaps randomly, by adding a
variation di(t) to a current mean value mi. The changes in the quantities
xi and E are correlated, and the result is used to slowly change mi. The
filters are to remove DC components. This technique, a form of coherent
detection, usually has an advantage over methods dealing separately and
sequentially with each parameter. Cf. the discussion of "informative
feedback" in Wiener [11], p133ff. A great variety of hill-climbing systems
have been studied under the names of “adaptive” or “self-optimizing”
servomechanisms.

C. Troubles with Hill-Climbing

Obviously, the gradient-following hill-climber would be trapped if it

should reach a local peak which is not a true or satisfactory optimum. It
must then be forced to try larger steps or changes. It is often supposed that
this false-peak problem is the chief obstacle to machine learning by this
method. This certainly can be troublesome. But for really difficult
problems, it seems to us that usually the more fundamental problem lies in
finding any significant peak at all. Unfortunately the known E functions for
difficult problems often exhibit what we have called [7] the “Mesa
Phenomenon” in which a small change in a parameter usually leads to
either no change in performance or to a large change in performance. The
space is thus composed primarily of flat regions or “mesas.” Any tendency
of the trial generator to make small steps then results in much aimless
wandering without compensating information gains. A profitable search in
such a space requires steps so large that hill-climbing is essentially ruled
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out. The problem-solver must find other methods; hill-climbing might still
be feasible with a different heuristic connection.

Certainly, in human intellectual behavior we rarely solve a tricky problem

by a steady climb toward success. I doubt that any one simple mechanism,
e.g., hill-climbing, will provide the means to build an efficient and general
problem-solving machine. Probably, an intelligent machine will require a
variety of different mechanisms. These will be arranged in hierarchies, and
in even more complex, perhaps recursive structures. And perhaps what
amounts to straightforward hill-climbing on one level may sometimes
appear (on a lower level) as the sudden jumps of “insight.”

II. THE PROBLEM OF PATTERN RECOGNITION

Summary—In order not to try all possibilities, a resourceful machine

must classify problem situations into categories associated with the
domains of effectiveness of the machine's different methods. These
pattern-recognition methods must extract the heuristically significant
features of the objects in question. The simplest methods simply match
the objects against standards or prototypes. More powerful “property-
list” methods subject each object to a sequence of tests, each detecting
some property of heuristic importance. These properties have to be
invariant under commonly encountered forms of distortion. Two
important problems arise here—inventing new useful properties, and
combining many properties to form a recognition system. For complex
problems, such methods will have to be augmented by facilities for
subdividing complex objects and describing the complex relations
between their parts.

Any powerful heuristic program is bound to contain a variety of different

methods and techniques. At each step of the problem-solving process, the
machine will have to decide what aspect of the problem to work on, and
then which method to use. A choice must be made, for we usually cannot
afford to try all the possibilities.
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In order to deal with a goal or a problem, that is, to choose an appropriate

method, we have to recognize what kind of thing it is. Thus, the need to
choose among actions compels us to provide the machine with
classification techniques, or means of evolving them. It is of overwhelming
importance for the machine to have classification techniques, which are
realistic. But “realistic- can be defined only with respect to the
environments to be encountered by the machine, and with respect to the
methods available to it. Distinctions which cannot be exploited are not
worth recognizing. And methods are usually worthless without
classification schemes that can help decide when they are applicable.

A. Teleological Requirements of Classification

The useful classifications are those which match the goals and methods of
the machine. The objects grouped together in the classifications should
have something of heuristic value in common; they should be “similar” in
a useful sense; they should depend on relevant or essential features. We
should not be surprised, then, to find ourselves using inverse or teleological
expressions to define the classes. We really do want to have a grip on “the
class of objects which can be transformed into a result of form Y,” that is,
the class of objects which will satisfy some goal. One should be wary of
the familiar injunction against using teleological language in science.
While it is true `that talking of goals in some contexts may dispose us
towards certain kinds of animistic explanations, this need not be a bad
thing in the field of problem-solving; it is hard to see how one can solve
problems without thoughts of purposes. The real difficulty with
teleological definitions is technical, not philosophical, and arises when they
have to be used and not just mentioned. One obviously cannot afford to use
for classification a method that actually requires waiting for some remote
outcome, if one needs the classification precisely for deciding whether to
try out that method. So, in practice, the ideal teleological definitions often
have to be replaced by practical approximations, usually with some risk of
error; that is, the definitions have to be made heuristically effective, or
economically usable. This is of great importance. (We can think of
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“heuristic effectiveness” as contrasted to the ordinary mathematical notion

of “effectiveness” which distinguishes those definitions which can be
realized at all by machine, regardless of efficiency.)

B. Patterns and Descriptions

It is usually necessary to have ways of assigning names to symbolic

expressions—to the defined classes. The structure of the names will have a
crucial influence on the mental world of the machine, for it determines
what kinds of things can be conveniently thought about. There are a variety
of ways to assign names. The simplest schemes use what we will call
conventional (or proper) names; here, arbitrary symbols are assigned to
classes. But we will also want to use complex descriptions or computed
names; these are constructed for classes by processes that depend on the
class definitions. To be useful, these should reflect some of the structure of
the things they designate, abstracted in a manner relevant to the problem
area. The notion of description merges smoothly into the more complex
notion of model; as we think of it, a model is a sort of active description. It
is a thing whose form reflects some of the structure of the thing
represented, but which also has some of the character of a working
machine.

In Section III, we will consider “learning” systems. The behavior of those

systems can be made to change in reasonable ways depending on what
happened to them in the past. But by themselves, the simple learning
systems are useful only in recurrent situations; they cannot cope with any
significant novelty. Nontrivial performance is obtained only when learning
systems are supplemented with classification or pattern-recognition
methods of some inductive ability. For the variety of objects encountered
in a nontrivial search is so enormous that we cannot depend on recurrence,
and the mere accumulation of records of past experience can have only
limited value. Pattern-Recognition, by providing a heuristic connection
which links the old to the new, can make learning broadly useful.

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What is a “pattern”? We often use this term to mean a set of objects which
can in some (useful) way be treated alike. For each problem area we must
ask, “What patterns would be useful for a machine working on such
problems?”

The problems of visual pattern-recognition' have received much attention

in recent years and most of our examples are from this area.

C. Prototype-Derived Patterns

The problem of reading printed characters is a clear- cut instance of a

situation in which the classification is based ultimately on a fixed set of
“prototypes”—e.g., the dies from which the type font was made. The
individual marks on the printed page may show the results of many
distortions. Some distortions are rather systematic—such as changes in
size, position, and orientation. Other distortions have the nature of noise:
blurring, grain, low contrast, etc.

If the noise is not too severe, we may be able to manage the identification
by what we call a normalization and template-matching process. We first
remove the differences related to size and position—that is, we normalize
the input figure. One may do this, for example, by constructing a similar
figure inscribed in a certain fixed triangle (see below) or one may
transform the figure to obtain a certain fixed center of gravity and a unit
second central moment.

A simple normalization technique. If an object is expanded uniformly,

without rotation, until it touches all three sides of a triangle, the resulting
figure will be unique, so that pattern recognition can proceed without
concern about relative size and position.

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There is an additional problem with rotational equivalence where it is not

easy to avoid all ambiguities. One does not want to equate “6” and “9”. For
that matter, one does not want to equate (0, o), or (X, x) or the 0's in xo and
xo—so that there may be context-dependency involved. Once normalized,
the unknown figure can be compared with templates for the prototypes and,
by means of some measure of matching, choose the best fitting template.
Each “matching criterion” will be sensitive to particular forms of noise and
distortion, and so will each normalization procedure. The inscribing or
boxing method may be sensitive to small specks, while the moment
method will be especially sensitive to smearing, at least for thin-line
figures, etc. The choice of a matching criterion must depend on the kinds of
noise and transformations commonly encountered. Still, for many
problems we may get acceptable results by using straightforward
correlation methods.

When the class of equivalence transformations is very large, e.g., when

local stretching and distortion are present, there will be difficulty in finding
a uniform normalization method. Instead, one may have to consider a
process of adjusting locally for best fit to the template. (While measuring
the matching, one could “jitter” the figure locally; if an improvement were
found the process could be repeated using a slightly different change, etc.)
There is usually no practical possibility of applying to the figure all of the
admissible transformations. And to recognize the topological equivalence
of pairs such as those below is likely beyond any practical kind of iterative
local-improvement or hill-climbing matching procedure. (Such
recognitions can be mechanized, though, by methods which follow lines,
detect vertices, and build up a description in the form, say, of a vertex-
connection table.)

The figures A, A' and B, B' are topologically equivalent pairs. Lengths
have been distorted in an arbitrary manner, but the connectivity relations
between corresponding points have been preserved. In Sherman (8] and
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Haller [391 we find computer programs which can deal with such
equivalences.

The template-matching scheme, with its normalization and direct

comparison and matching criterion, is just too limited in conception to be
of much use in problems that are more difficult. If the transformation set is
large, normalization, or “fitting,” may be impractical, especially if there is
no adequate heuristic connection on the space of transformations.
Furthermore, for each defined pattern, the system has to be presented with
a prototype. But if one has in mind an abstract class, one may simply be
unable to represent its essential features with one or a very few concrete
examples. How could one represent with a single prototype the class of
figures, which have an even number of disconnected parts? Clearly, the
template system has negligible descriptive power. The property-list system
frees us from some of these limitations.

D. Property Lists and “Characters”

We define a property to be a two-valued function, which divides figures

into two classes; a figure is said to have or not have the property according
to whether the function's value is 1 or 0. Given a number N of distinction
properties, we could define as many as 2**n subclasses by their set
intersections and, hence, as many as 2**2**n patterns by combining the
properties with ANDs and ORs. Thus, if we have three properties,
rectilinear, connected, and cyclic, there are eight subclasses and 256
patterns defined by their intersections

The eight regions represent all the possible configurations of values of

the three properties "rectilinear," "connected," "containing a loop." Each

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region contains a representative figure, and its associated binary

"Character" sequence.

If the given properties are placed in a fixed order then we can represent any
of these elementary regions by a vector, or string of digits. The vector so
assigned to each figure will be called the Character of that figure (with
respect to the sequence of properties in question). (In [9] we use the term
characteristic for a property without restriction to 2 values.) Thus a square
has the Character (1, 1, 1) and a circle the Character (0, 1, 1) for the given
sequence of properties.

For many problems, one can use such Characters as names for categories
and as primitive elements with which to define an adequate set of patterns.
Characters are more than conventional names. They are instead very
rudimentary forms of description (having the form of the simplest
symbolic expression—the list) whose structure provides some information
about the designated classes. This is a step, albeit a small one, beyond the
template method; the Characters are not simple instances of the patterns,
and the properties may themselves be very abstract. Finding a good set of
properties is the major concern of many heuristic programs.

E. Invariant Properties

One of the prime requirements of a good property is that it be invariant

under the commonly encountered equivalence transformations. Thus for
visual Pattern-Recognition we would usually want the object identification
to be independent of uniform changes in size and position. In their
pioneering paper 1947 Pitts and McCulloch [10] describe a general
technique for forming invariant properties from noninvariant ones,
assuming that the transformation space has a certain (group) structure.

The idea behind their mathematical argument is this: suppose that we have
a function P of figures, and suppose that for a given figure F we define [F]
= {F1, F2 . . .} to be the set of all figures equivalent to F under the given
set of transformations; further, define P [F] to be the set {P (F1), P (F2), . .
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.} of values of P on those figures. Finally, define P* [F] to be AVERAGE

(P [F]). Then we have a new property P* whose values are independent of
the selection of F from an equivalence class defined by the
transformations. We have to be sure that when different representatives are
chosen from a class the collection [F] will always be the same in each
case. In the case of continuous transformation spaces, there will have to be
a measure or the equivalent associated with the set [F] with respect to
which the operation AVERAGE is defined, say, as an integration. In the
case studied in [10] the transformation space is a group with a uniquely
defined Haar measure: the set [F] can be computed without repetitions by
scanning through the application of all the transforms T to the given figure
so that the invariant property can be defined by their integration over that
measure. The result is invariant of which figure is chosen because the
integration is over a (compact) group.

This method is proposed as a neurophysiological model for pitch-invariant

hearing and size-invariant visual recognition (supplemented with visual
centering mechanisms). This model is discussed also on p160 of Wiener
[11].) Practical application is probably limited to one-dimensional groups
and analog scanning devices.

In most recent work, this problem is avoided by using properties already

invariant under these transformations. Thus, a property might count the
number of connected components in a picture—which is invariant of size
and position. Or a property may count the number of vertical lines in a
picture—which is invariant of size and position (but not rotation).

F. Generating Properties

The problem of generating useful properties has been discussed by

Selfridge [12]; we shall summarize his approach. The machine is given, at
the start, a few basic transformations A1,...An, each of which transforms,
in some significant way, each figure into another figure. A1 might, for

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example, remove all points not on a boundary of a solid region; A2 might

leave only vertex points; A3 might fill up hollow regions, etc.

An arbitrary sequence of picture transformations, followed by a

numerical-valued function, can be used as a property function for
pictures. A1 removes all points which are not at the edge of a solid
region. A2 leaves only vertex points at which an arc suddenly changes
direction. The function C simply counts the number of points remaining
in the picture.

Each sequence Ai1, Ai2 , . . . of such operations forms a new

transformation, so that there is available an infinite variety. We provide the
machine also with one or more “terminal" operations that convert a picture
into a number, so that any sequence of the elementary transformations,
followed by a terminal operation, defines a property. (Dineen [13] and
Kirsch [] describe how such processes were programmed in a digital
computer.) We can start with a few short sequences, perhaps chosen
randomly. Selfridge describes how the machine might learn new useful
properties.

"We now feed the machine A's and 0's telling the machine each time
which letter it is. Beside each sequence under the two letters, the
machine builds up distribution functions from the results of applying the
sequences to the image. Now, since the sequences were chosen
completely randomly, it may well be that most of the sequences have very
flat distribution functions; that is, they [provide] no information, and the
sequences are therefore [by definition] not significant. Let it discard these
and pick some others. Sooner or later, however, some sequences will
prove significant; that is, their distribution functions will peak up
somewhere. What the machine does now is to build up new sequences
like the significant ones. This is the important point. If it merely chose
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sequences at random, it might take a very long while indeed to find the
best sequences. But with some successful sequences, or partly successful
ones, to guide it, we hope that the process will be much quicker. The
crucial question remains: How do we build up sequences “like” other
sequences, but not identical? As of now we think we shall merely build
sequences from the transition frequencies of the significant sequences.
We shall build up a matrix of transition frequencies from the significant
ones, and use them as transition probabilities with which to choose new
sequences.
"We do not claim that this method is necessarily a very good way of
choosing sequences—only that it should do better than not using at all
the knowledge of what kinds of sequences have worked. It has seemed to
us that this is the crucial point of learning." See p. 93 of [12].

It would indeed be remarkable if this failed to yield properties more useful

than would be obtained from completely random sequence selection. The
generating problem is discussed further in Minsky [14]. Newell, Shaw, and
Simon [15] describe more deliberate, less statistical, techniques that might
be used to discover sets of properties appropriate to a given problem area.
One may think of the Selfridge proposal as a system that uses a finite-state
language to describe its properties. Solomonoff [18 and [55] proposes
some techniques for discovering common features of a set of expressions,
e.g., of the descriptions of those properties of already established utility;
the methods can then be applied to generate new properties with the same
common features. I consider the lines of attack in [12], [15], [18] and [55],
although still incomplete, to be of the greatest importance.

G. Combining Properties

One cannot expect easily to find a small set of properties that will be just
right for a problem area. It is usually much easier to find a large set of
properties each of which provides a little useful information. Then one is
faced with the problem of finding a way to combine them to make the
desired distinctions. The simplest method is to define, for each class, a
prototypical "characteristic vector" (a particular sequence of property
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values) and then to use some matching procedure, e.g., counting the
numbers of agreements and disagreements, to compare an unknown with
these chosen prototypes.

The linear weighting scheme described just below is a slight generalization

on this. Such methods treat the properties as more or less independent
evidence for and against propositions; more general procedures (about
which we have yet little practical information) must account also for
nonlinear relations between properties, i.e., must contain weighting terms
for joint subsets of property values.

I. “Bayes nets” for combining independent properties:

We consider a single experiment in which an object is placed in front of a

property-list machine. Each property E; will have a value, 0 or 1. Suppose
that there has been defined some set of object classes Fj, and that we want
to use the outcome of this experiment to decide in which of these classes
the object belongs.

Assume that the situation is probabilistic, and that we know the probability
pij that, if the object is in class Fj then the i-th property Ei will have value
1. Assume further that these properties are independent; that is, even given
Fj, knowledge of the value of Ei tells us nothing more about the value of a
different Ek in the same experiment. (This is a strong condition—see
below.) Let fj be the absolute probability that an object is in class Fi.
Finally, for this experiment define V to be the particular set of is for which
the Ei's are 1. Then this V represents the Character of the object! From the
definition of conditional probability, we have

Pr(Fi,V) = Pr(V)Pr (Fj|V) = Pr(Fj)Pr(V|Fj)

Given the Character V, we want to guess which Fj has occurred (with the
least chance of being wrong—the so-called maximum likelihood estimate);
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that is, for which j is Pr(Fj) the largest. Since in the above Pr(V) does not
depend on j, we have only to calculate for which j is Pr(V)Pr(Fj|V) =
Pr(Fj)Pr(V|Fj) the largest. Hence, by our independence hypothesis, we
have to maximize
fjPpijPqij = fjPpij/qijPqij,
.
where the first product is over V and the second, over its complement.
These “maximum likelihood” decisions can be made (Fig. 6) by a simple
network device. [7]

"Net” model for maximum-likelihood decisions based on linear

weightings of property values. The input data are examined by each
"property filter” Ei. Each of these has 0 and 1 output channels, one of
which is excited by each input. These outputs are weighted by the
corresponding pij's, as shown in the text. The resulting signals are
multiplied in the Fj units, each of which collects evidence for a particular
figure class. (We could have used here log(pij), and added.) The final
decision is made by the topmost unit D, who merely chooses that Fj with
the largest score. Note that the logarithm of the coefficient pij/qij in the
second expression of (1) can be construed as the “weight of the
evidence” of Ei in favor of Fj. (See also [21] and [22].)

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Note: At the cost of an additional network layer, we may also account for
the possible cost gjk that would be incurred if we were to assign to Fk a
figure really in class Fj. In this case, the minimum cost decision is given by
the k for which SigjkfjPpijPqij.

These nets resemble the general schematic diagrams proposed in the

“Pandemonium” model of [Selfridge 19, Fig. 3.] It is proposed there that
some intellectual processes might be carried out by a hierarchy of
simultaneously functioning submachines called 'demons'. Each unit is set
to detect certain patterns in the activity of others, and the output of each
unit announces the degree of confidence of that unit that it sees what it is
looking for. Our Ei units are Selfridge's "data demons.” Our units Fj are his
“cognitive demons”; each collects, from the abstracted data, evidence for a
specific proposition. The topmost “decision demon” D responds to that one
in the multitude below it whose shriek is the loudest. (See also the report in
[20].)

It is quite easy to add to this “Bayes network model” a mechanism, which

will enable it to learn the optimal connection weightings. Imagine that,
after each event, the machine is told which F has occurred; we could
implement this by sending back a signal along the connections leading to
that F unit. Suppose that the connection or for pij or qij contains a two-
terminal device (or “synapse”) which stores a number wij. Whenever the
joint event (Fj, Ei = 1) occurs, we modify wij by replacing it by (wij +1)q,
where q is a factor slightly less than unity. And when the joint event (Fj, Ei
= 0) occurs, we decrement wij by replacing it with (wij) q. It is not difficult
to show that the expected values of the wij 's will become proportional to
the pij 's [and, in fact, approach pij [q/(1-q]. Hence, the machine tends to
learn the optimal weighting on the basis of experience. (One must put in a
similar mechanism for estimating the fj 's.) The variance of the normalized
weight approaches [(1-q)/(1 +q)] pijqij; Thus a small value for q means
rapid learning but is associated with a large variance, hence, with low
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reliability. Choosing q close to unity means slow, but reliable, learning. q is

really a sort of memory decay constant, and its choice must be determined
by the noise and stability of the environment much noise requires long
averaging times, while a changing environment requires fast adaptation.
The two requirements are, of course, incompatible and the decision has to
be based on an economic compromise. (See also [7] and [21])

G. Using random nets for Bayes decisions:

The nets of Fig. 6 are very orderly in structure. Is all this structure
necessary? Certainly if there were a great many properties, each of which
provided very little marginal information, some of them would not be
missed. Then one might expect good results with a mere sampling of all
the possible connection paths w~~. And one might thus, in this special
situation, use a random connection net. The two-layer nets here resemble
those of the “perceptron” proposal of Rosenblatt [22]. I n the latter, there is
an additional level of connections coming directly from randomly selected
points of a “retina.” Here the properties, the devices which abstract the
visual input data, are simple functions which add some inputs, subtract
others, and detect whether the result exceeds a threshold. Equation (1), we
think, illustrates what is of value in this scheme. It does seem clear that
such nets can handle a maximum-likelihood type of analysis of the output
of the property functions. But these nets, with their simple, randomly
generated, connections can probably never achieve recognition of such
patterns as “the class of figures having two separated parts,” and they
cannot even achieve the effect of template recognition without size and
position normalization (unless sample figures have been presented
previously in essentially all sizes and positions). For the chances are
extremely small of finding, by random methods, enough properties usefully
correlated with patterns appreciably more abstract than are those of the
prototype-derived kind. And these networks can really only separate out
(by weighting) information in the individual input properties; they cannot
extract further information present in nonadditive form. The “perceptron”
class of machines has facilities neither for obtaining better-than-chance

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properties nor for assembling better-than-additive combinations of those it

gets from random construction.10

For recognizing normalized printed or hand-printed characters, single-point

properties do surprisingly well [23]; this amounts to just “averaging” many
samples. Bledsoe and Browning [24] claim good results with point-pair
properties. Roberts [25] describes a series of experiments in this general
area. Doyle [26] without normalization but with quite sophisticated
properties obtains excellent results; his properties are already substantially
size- and position-invariant. A general review of Doyle's work and other
pattern-recognition experiments will be found in Selfridge and Neisser
[20].
For the complex discrimination, e.g., between one and two connected
objects, the property problem is very serious, especially for long wiggly
objects such as are handled by Kirsch [27]. Here some kind of recursive
processing is required and combinations of simple properties would almost
certainly fail even with large nets and long training.

We should not leave the discussion of decision net models without noting
their important limitations. The hypothesis that the pis represent
independent events is a very strong condition indeed. Without this
hypothesis we could still construct maximum- likelihood nets, but we
would need an additional layer of cells to represent all of the joint events
V; that is, we would need to know all the Pr (Fj|V). This gives a general
(but trivial) solution, but requires 2**n cells for n properties, which is
completely impractical for large systems. What is required is a system
which computes some sampling of all the joint conditional probabilities,
and uses these to estimate others when needed. The work of Uttley [28],
[29], bears on this problem, but his proposed and experimental devices do
not yet clearly show how to avoid exponential growth. See also Roberts
[25], Papert [21], and Hawkins [22]. We can find nothing resembling this
type of analysis in Rosenblatt [22].

H. Articulation and Attention—Limitations of the Property-List Method

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[Note: I substantially revised this section in December 2000, to clarify and

simplify the notations.] Because of its fixed size, the property-list scheme
is limited in the complexities of the relations it can describe. If a machine
can recognize a chair and a table, it surely should be able to tell us that
"there is a chair and a table." To an extent, we can invent properties in
which some such relationships are embedded, but no formula of fixed form
can represent arbitrary complex relationships. Thus, we might want to
describe the leftmost figure below as,

"A rectangle (1) contains two subfigures disposed horizontally. The part
on the left is a rectangle (2) that contains two subfigures disposed
vertically, the upper part of which is a circle (3) and the lower a triangle
(4). The part on the right . . . etc."

Such a description entails an ability to separate or "segment" the scene into

parts. (Note that in this example, the articulation is essentially recursive;
the figure is first divided into two parts; then each part is described using
the same machinery.) We can formalize this kind of description in an
expression language whose fundamental grammatical form is a function
R(L) where F names a relation and L is an ordered list of the objects or
subfigures which bear that relation to one another. We obtain the required
flexibility by allowing the members of the list L to contain not only the
names of "elementary" figures but also "expressions that describe
subfigures. Then the leftmost scene above may be described by the
expression

IN(box(-->(IN (box (ABOVE(cir, triangle))), IN(cir(ABOVE (-->(cir, cir),

cir))))))),

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where "IN (x, y)" means 'y is inside x,'-->(x y)" means 'X is to the left of
Y,' and "ABOVE (x, y)" means 'x is above y.' This description may be
regarded as an expression in a simple "list-structure" language. Newell,
Shaw and Simon have developed powerful computer techniques for
manipulating symbolic expressions in such languages for purposes of
heuristic programming. (See the remarks at the end of Section IV. If some
of the members of a list are lists, they must be surrounded by exterior
parentheses, and this accounts for the accumulation of parentheses.
This description language may be regarded as a simple kind of "list-
structure" language. Newell, Shaw and Simon have developed powerful
computer techniques for manipulating symbolic expressions in such
languages for purposes of heuristic programming. See the remarks at the
end of Section IV. By introducing notation for the relations 'inside of', 'to
the left of', and 'above', we construct a symbolic description. Such
descriptions can be formed and manipulated by machines.

By abstracting out the complex relation between the parts of the figure, we
can re-use the same formula to describe all three of the figures above, by
using the same "more abstract" expression for all of them:
F(A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H) = IN(A, (-->(IN(B, (ABOVE (C, D))), IN(E,
(ABOVE (-->(F, G, H))))))),

in which each particular geometric figure is replaced by one of the new

variables. Thus, the left-hand figure can be represented by

F(box, box, cir, tri, cir, cir, cir, cir),

and the other two scenes can be represented by the same F with different
substitutions for its variables. It is up to the programmer to decide at just
what level of complexity a part of a picture should be considered
"primitive". This will depend on what the description is to be used for. We
could further divide the drawings into vertices, lines, and arcs. Obviously,
for some applications the relations would need more metrical information,
e.g., specification of lengths or angles.
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The important thing about such "articular" descriptions is that they can be
obtained by repeated application of a fixed set of pattern-recognition
techniques. Thus we can obtain arbitrarily complex descriptions from a
fixed complexity classification-mechanism. The new element required in
the mechanism (beside the capacity to manipulate the list-structures) is the
ability to articulate—to "attend fully" to a selected part of the picture and
bring all one's resources to bear on that part. In efficient problem-solving
programs, w e will not usually complete such a description in a single
operation. Instead, the depth or detail of description will be under the
control of other processes. These will reach deeper, or look more carefully,
only when they have to, e.g., when the presently available description is
inadequate for a current goal. The author, together with L. Hodes, is
working on pattern-recognition schemes using articular descriptions. By
manipulating the formal descriptions, we can deal with overlapping and
incomplete figures, and several other problems of the “Gestalt” type.

It seems likely that as machines are turned toward more difficult problem
areas, passive classification systems will become less adequate, and we
may have to turn toward schemes which are based more on internally-
generated hypotheses, perhaps “error-controlled” along the lines proposed
by MacKay [89].

Space requires us to terminate this discussion of pattern-recognition and

description. Among the important works not reviewed here should be
mentioned those of Bomba [33] and Grimsdale, et al. [34], which involve
elements of description, Unger [35] and Holland [36] for parallel
processing schemes, Hebb [31] who is concerned with physiological
description models, and the work of the Gestalt psychologists, notably
Kohler [38] who have certainly raised, if not solved, a number of important
questions. Sherman [8], Haller [39] and others have completed programs
using line-tracing operations for topological classification. The papers of
Selfridge [12], [43], have been a major influence on work in this general
area.

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See also Kirsch, et al. [21], for discussion of a number of interesting

computer image-processing techniques, and see Minot [40] and Stevens
[41] for reviews of the reading machine and related problems. One should
also examine some biological work, e.g., Tinbergen [42] to see instances in
which some discriminations which seem, at first glance very complicated
are explained on the basis of a few apparently simple properties arranged
in simple decision trees.

III. LEARNING SYSTEMS

Summary—In order to solve a new problem, one should first try using
methods similar to those that have worked on similar problems. To
implement this “basic learning heuristic” one must generalize on past
experience, and one way to do this is to use success-reinforced decision
models. These learning systems are shown to be averaging devices. Using
devices that also learn which events are associated with reinforcement, i.e.,
reward, we can build more autonomous “secondary reinforcement”
systems. In applying such methods to complex problems, one encounters a
serious difficulty—in distributing credit for success of a complex strategy
among the many decisions that were involved. This problem can be
managed by arranging for local reinforcement of partial goals within a
hierarchy, and by grading the training sequence of problems to parallel a
process of maturation of the machine's resources.

In order to solve a new problem one uses what might be called the basic
learning heuristic first try using methods similar to those which have
worked, in the past, on similar problems. We want our machines, too, to
benefit from their past experience. Since we cannot expect new situations
to be precisely the same as old ones, any useful learning will have to
involve generalization techniques. There are too many notions associated
with `learning” to justify defining the term precisely. But we may be sure
that any useful learning system will have to -use records of the past as
evidence for more general propositions; it must thus entail some
commitment or other about “inductive inference.” (See Section V-B.)
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Perhaps the simplest way of generalizing about a set of entities is through

constructing a new one which is an “ideal,” or rather, a typical member of
that set; the usual way to do this is to smooth away variation by some sort
of averaging technique. And indeed we find that most of the simple
learning devices do incorporate some averaging technique--often that of
averaging some sort of product, thus obtaining a sort of correlation. We
shall discuss this family of devices here, and some more abstract schemes
in Section V.

A. Reinforcement

A reinforcement process is one in which some aspects of the behavior of a

system are caused to become more (or less) prominent in the future as a
consequence of the application of a “reinforcement operator” Z. This
operator is required to affect only those aspects of behavior for which
instances have actually occurred recently.

The analogy is with “reward” or “extinction” (not punishment) in animal

behavior. The important thing about this kind of process is that it is
“operant” (a term of Skinner [44]) the reinforcement operator does not
initiate behavior, but merely selects that which the Trainer likes from that
which has occurred. Such a system must then contain a device M which
generates a variety of behavior (say, in interacting with some environment)
and a Trainer who makes critical judgments in applying the available
reinforcement operators. (See Fig. 8.)

Let us consider a very simple "operant reinforcement" model.

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In response to a stimulus from the environment, the machine makes one of

several possible responses. It remembers what decisions were made in
choosing this response. Shortly thereafter, the Trainer sends to the machine
positive or negative reinforcement (reward) signal; this increases or
decreases the tendency to make the same decisions in the future. Note that
the Trainer need not know how to solve problems, but only how to detect
success or failure, or relative improvement; his function is selective. The
Trainer might be connected to observe the actual stimulus + response
activity or, in a more interesting kind of system, some function of the state
of the environment.

Suppose that on each presentation of a stimulus S an animal has to make a

choice, e.g., to turn left or right, and that its probability of turning right, at
the n-th trial, is pn. Suppose that we want it to turn right. Whenever it does
this, we might “reward” it by applying the operator Z+:

Pn+1 = Z+(pn) = q pn + (1-q) 0 < q < 1

which moves p a fraction (1-q) of the way towards unity. (Properly, the
reinforcement functions should depend both on the p's and on the previous
reaction. Reward should decrease p if our animal has just turned to the left.
The notation in the literature is somewhat confusing in this regard.) If we
dislike what it does we apply negative reinforcement,

moving p the same fraction of the way toward 0. Some theory of such
"linear" learning operators, generalized to several stimuli and responses,
will be found in Bush and Mosteller [45]. We can show that the learning
result is an average weighted by an exponentially-decaying time factor:
Let Zn be ±1 according to whether the n-th event is rewarded or
extinguished and replace pn by cn-2pn-1 so that -1<cn<1, as for a
correlation coefficient. Then (with c0 = 0) we obtain by induction

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and since

we can write this as.

(1)
If the term Zi is regarded as a product of (i) how the creature responded
and (ii) which kind of reinforcement was given, then cn is a kind of
correlation function (with the decay weighting) of the joint behavior of
these quantities. The ordinary, uniformly-weighted average has the same
general form but with time-dependent q:

(2)

In (1) we have again the situation described in Section II-G-1; a small

value of q gives fast learning, and the possibility of quick adaptation to a
changing environment. A near-unity value of q gives slow learning, but
also smoothes away uncertainties due to noise. As noted in Section II-G-1,
the response distribution comes to approximate the probabilities of rewards
of the alternative responses. The importance of this phenomenon has, I
think, been overrated; it is certainly not an especially rational strategy. One
reasonable alternative is that of computing the numbers pij as indicated,
but actually playing at each trial the “most likely” choice. Except in the
presence of a hostile opponent, there is usually no reason to play a “mixed”
strategy. The question of just how often one should play a strategy different
from the estimated optimum, in order to gain information, is an underlying
problem in many fields. See, e.g., [85].

Samuel's coefficient-optimizing program [2] [see Section III-C, 1)], uses an

ingenious compromise between the exponential and the uniform averaging
methods. The value of N in (2) above begins at 16 and so remains until n=
16, then N is 32 until n=32, and so on until n = 256. Thereafter N remains
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fixed at 256. This nicely prevents violent fluctuations in ~n at the start,

approaches the uniform weighting for a while, and finally approaches the
exponentially-weighted correlation, all in a manner that requires very little
computation effort. Samuel's program is at present the outstanding example
of a game-playing program that matches average human ability, and its
success (in real time) is attributed to a wealth of such elegancies, both in
heuristics and in programming.

The problem of extinction or “unlearning” is especially critical for

complex, hierarchical, learning. For, once a generalization about the past
has been made, one is likely to build upon it. Thus, one may come to select
certain properties as important and begin to use them in the
characterization of experience, perhaps storing one's memories in terms of
them. If later, it is discovered that some other properties would serve better,
then one must face the problem of translating, or abandoning, the records
based 011 the older system. This may be a very high price to pay. One does
not easily give up an old way of looking at things, if the better one
demands much effort and experience to be useful. Thus the training
sequences on which our machines will spend their infancies, so to speak,
must be chosen very shrewdly to insure that early abstractions will provide
a good foundation for later difficult problems.

Incidentally, in spite of the space given here for their exposition, I am not
convinced that such “incremental” or “statistical” learning schemes should
play a central role in our models. They will certainly continue to appear as
components of our programs but, I think, mainly by default. The more
intelligent one is, the more often he should be able to learn from an
experience something rather definite; e.g., to reject or accept a hypothesis,
or to change a goal. (The obvious exception is that of a truly statistical
environment in which averaging is inescapable. But the heart of problem
solving is always, we think, the combinatorial part that gives rise to
searches, and we should usually be able to regard the complexities caused
by “noise” as mere annoyances, however irritating they may be.) In this
connection, we can refer to the discussion of memory in Miller, Galanter
and Pribram [46]. This seems to be the first major work in Psychology to
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show the influence of work in the artificial intelligence area, and its
programme is generally quite sophisticated.

B. Secondary Reinforcement and Expectation Models

The simple reinforcement system is limited by its dependence on the

Trainer. If the Trainer can detect only the solution of a problem, then we
may encounter “mesa” phenomena, which will limit performance on
difficult problems. (See Section I-C.) One way to escape this is to have the
machine learn to generalize on what the Trainer does. Then, in difficult
problems, it may be able to give itself partial reinforcements along the way,
e.g., upon the solution of relevant subproblems. This machine has some
such ability:

An additional device U gives the machine of Fig. 8 the ability to learn

which signals from the environment have been associated with
reinforcement. The primary reinforcement signals S are routed through
U. By a Pavlovian conditioning process (not described here), external
signals come to produce reinforcement signals like those that have
frequently succeeded them in the past. Such signals might be abstract,
e.g., verbal encouragement. If the "secondary reinforcement” signals are
allowed, in turn, to acquire further external associations (through, e.g., a
channel ZU as shown) the machine might come to be able to handle
chains of subproblems. But something must be done to stabilize the
system against the positive symbolic feedback loop formed by the path
ZU. The profound difficulty presented by this stabilization problem may
be reflected in the fact that, in lower animals, it is very difficult to
demonstrate such chaining effects.

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The new unit U is a device that learns which external stimuli are strongly
correlated with the various reinforcement signals, and responds to such
stimuli by reproducing the corresponding reinforcement signals. (The
device U is not itself a reinforcement learning device; it is more like a
“Pavlovian” conditioning device, treating the Z signals as “unconditioned”
stimuli and the S signals as moves and replies. We might also limit the
number of conditioned stimuli.) The heuristic idea is that any signal from
the environment that in the past has been well-correlated with (say)
positive reinforcement is likely to be an indication that something good has
just happened. If the training on early problems was such that this is
realistic, then the system eventually should be able to detach itself from the
Trainer, and become autonomous. If we further permit “chaining” of the
“secondary reinforcers,” e.g., by admitting the connection shown as a
dotted line, the scheme becomes quite powerful, in principle. There are
obvious pitfalls in admitting such a degree of autonomy; the values of the
system may drift to a non-adaptive condition.

C: Prediction and Expectation

The evaluation unit U is supposed to acquire an ability to tell whether a

situation is good or bad. This evaluation could be applied to imaginary
situations as well as to real ones. If we could estimate the consequences of
a proposed action (without its actual execution), we could use U to
evaluate the (estimated) resulting situation. This could help in reducing the
effort in search, and we would have in effect a machine with some ability
to look ahead, or plan. In order to do this we need an additional device P
which, given the descriptions of a situation and an action, will predict a
description of the likely result. (We will discuss schemes for doing this in
Section IV-C.) The device P might be constructed along the lines of a
reinforcement learning device. In such a system, the required
reinforcement signals would have a very attractive character. For the
machine must reinforce P positively when the actual outcome resembles
that which was predicted accurate expectations are rewarded. If we could
further add a premium to reinforcement of those predictions which have a
novel aspect, we might expect to discern behavior motivated by a sort of
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curiosity. In the reinforcement of mechanisms for confirmed novel

expectations (or new explanations), we may find the key to simulation of
intellectual motivation. See the discussion of Bernstein [48] and the more
extensive discussion in the very suggestive paper of Newell, Shaw, and
Simon [49]; one should not overlook the pioneering paper of Newell [50]
and Samuel's discussion of the minimaxing process in [2].

Samuel's Program for Checkers

In Samuel's “generalization learning” program for the game of checkers [2]

we find a novel heuristic technique which could be regarded as a simple
example of the “expectation reinforcement” notion. Let us review very
briefly the situation in playing two-person board games of this kind. As
noted by Shannon [3] such games are in principle finite, and a best strategy
can be found by following out all possible continuations—if he goes there I
can go there, or there, etc.—and then “backing-up” or “minimaxing” from
the terminal positions, won, lost, or drawn. But in practice, the full
exploration of the resulting colossal “move-tree” is out of the question. No
doubt, some exploration will always be necessary for such games. But the
tree must be pruned. We might simply put a limit on depth of exploration—
the number of moves and replies. We might also limit the number of
alternatives explored from each position—this requires some heuristics for
selection of "plausible moves." Now, if the backing-up technique is still to
be used (with the incomplete move-tree) one has to substitute for the
absolute “win, lose, or draw” criterion some other “static” way of
evaluating nonterminal positions. [Note: In some problems the backing-up
process can be handled in closed analytic form so that one may be able to
use such methods as Bellman's “Dynamic Programming” [51]. Freimer
[52] gives some examples for which limited “look-ahead” doesn't work.]

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"Backing-up" the static evaluations of proposed moves in a game-tree.

From the vertex at the left, representing the present position in a board
game radiate three branches representing the player's proposed moves.
Each of these might be countered by a variety of opponent moves, and so
on. According to some program, a finite tree is generated. Then the worth
to the player of each terminal board position is estimated. (See text) If the
opponent has the same values, he will choose to minimize the score while
the player will always try to maximize. The heavy lines show how this
minimaxing process backs up until a choice is determined for the present
position.
The full tree for chess has the order of 10120 branches—beyond the reach
of any man or computer. There is a fundamental heuristic exchange)
between the effectiveness of the evaluation function and the extent of the
tree. A very weak evaluation (e.g. one that just compares the player's
values of pieces) would yield a devastating game if the machine could
explore all continuations out to, say 20 levels. But only 6 levels, roughly
within range of our presently largest computers, would probably not give a
brilliant game; less exhaustive strategies perhaps along the lines of [49]
would be more profitable.

Perhaps the simplest scheme is to use a weighted sum of some selected set
of “property” functions of the positions mobility, advancement, center
control, and the like. This is done in Samuel's program, and in most of its
predecessors. Associated with this is a multiple-simultaneous-optimizer
method for discovering a good coefficient assignment (using the
correlation technique noted in Section III-A). But the source of
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reinforcement signals in [2] is novel. One cannot afford to play out one or
more entire games for each single learning step. Samuel measures instead
for each move the difference between what the evaluation function yields
directly of a position and what it predicts on the basis of an extensive
continuation exploration, i.e., backing-up. The sign of this error, "Delta,""
is used for reinforcement; thus the system may learn something at each
move.

Note: It should be noted that [2] describes also a rather successful

checker-playing program based on recording and retrieving information
about positions encountered in the past, a less abstract way of exploiting
past experience. Samuel's work is notable in the variety of experiments
that were performed with and without various heuristics. This gives an
unusual opportunity to really find out how different heuristic methods
compare. More workers should choose (other things being equal)
problems for which such variations are practicable. See p. 108 of [50].

D. The Credit-Assignment Problem for Learning Systems

In playing a complex game such as chess or checkers, or in writing a

computer program, one has a definite success criterion—the game is won
or lost. But in the course of play, each ultimate success (or failure) is
associated with a vast number of internal decisions. If the run is successful,
how can we assign credit for the success among the multitude of decisions?
As Newell noted,

"It is extremely doubtful whether there is enough information in "win,

lose or draw", when referred to the whole play of the game to permit any
learning at all over available time scales.... For learning to take place,
each play of the game must yield much more information. This is . . .
achieved by breaking the problem into components. The unit of success is
the goal. If a goal is achieved its subgoals are reinforced. If not, they are
inhibited. (Actually, what is reinforced is the transformation rule that
provided the subgoal.) … . This also is true of the other kinds of
structure: every tactic that is created provides information about the
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success or failure of tactic search rules; every opponent's action provides

information about success or failure of likelihood inferences; and so on.
The amount of information relevant to learning increases directly with
the number of mechanisms in the chess-playing machine.

We are in complete agreement with Newell on this approach to the

problem. [See also Samuel's discussion (p. 22 of [2]) on assigning credit
for a change in "Delta."]

It is my impression that many workers in the area of "self-organizing""

systems and "random neural nets"' do not feel the urgency of this problem.
Suppose that one million decisions are involved in a complex task (such as
winning a chess game). Could we assign to each decision element one-
millionth of the credit for the completed task? In certain special situations
we can do just this—e.g., in the machines of [22], [25] and [92], etc.,
where the connections being reinforced are to a sufficient degree
independent. But the problem-solving ability is correspondingly weak.

For more complex problems, with decisions in hierarchies (rather than

summed on the same level) and with increments small enough to assure
probable convergence, the running times would become fantastic. For
complex problems, we will have to define "success'" in some rich local
sense. Some of the difficulty may be evaded by using carefully graded
"training sequences"" as described in the following section.

Friedberg's Program-Writing Program: An important example of

comparative failure in this credit-assignment matter is provided by the
program of Friedberg [53], [54] to solve program-writing problems. The
problem here is to write programs for a (simulated) very simple digital
computer. A simple problem is assigned, e.g., "compute the AND of two
bits in storage and put the result in an assigned location. "" A generating
device produces a random (64-instruction) program. The program is run
and its success or failure is noted. The success information is used to
reinforce individual instructions (in fixed locations) so that each success
tends to increase the chance that the instructions of successful programs
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will appear in later trials. (We lack space for details of how this is done.)
Thus the program tries to find "good" instructions, more or less
independently, for each location in program memory. The machine did
learn to solve some extremely simple problems. But it took of the order of
1000 times longer than pure chance would expect. In part I of [54], this
failure is discussed and attributed in part to what we called (Section I-C)
the "Mesa phenomenon." In changing just one instruction at a time, the
machine had not taken large enough steps in its search through program
space.

The second paper goes on to discuss a sequence of modifications in the

program generator and its reinforcement operators. With these, and with
some "priming" (starting the machine off on the right track with some
useful instructions), the system came to be only a little worse than chance.
The authors of [54] conclude that with these improvements "the generally
superior performance of those machines with a success-number
reinforcement mechanism over those without does serve to indicate that
such a mechanism can provide a basis for constructing a learning
machine." I disagree with this conclusion. It seems to me that each of the
"improvements" can be interpreted as serving only to increase the step size
of the search, that is, the randomness of the mechanism; this helps to avoid
the "mesa" phenomenon and thus approach chance behavior. But it
certainly does not show that the "learning mechanism" is working--one
would want at least to see some better-than-chance results before arguing
this point. The trouble, it seems, is with credit-assignment. The credit for a
working program can only be assigned to functional groups of instructions,
e.g., subroutines, and as these operate in hierarchies, we should not expect
individual instruction reinforcement to work well. (See the introduction to
[53] for a thoughtful discussion of the plausibility of the scheme.) It seems
surprising that it was not recognized in [54] that the doubts raised earlier
were probably justified. In the last section of [54], we see some real
success obtained by breaking the problem into parts and solving them
sequentially. This successful demonstration using division into
subproblems does not use any reinforcement mechanism at all. Some
experiments of similar nature are reported in [94].
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It is my conviction that no scheme for learning, or for pattern-recognition,

can have very- general utility unless there are provisions for recursive, or at
least hierarchical use of previous results. We cannot expect at learning,
system- to come to handle very hard problems without preparing it with a
reasonably graded sequence of problems of growing difficulty. The first
problem must be one that can be solved in reasonable time with the initial
resources. The next must be capable of solution in reasonable time by
using reasonably simple and accessible combinations of methods
developed in the first, and so on. The only alternatives to this use of an
adequate "training sequence" are 1) advanced resources, given initially, or
2) the fantastic exploratory processes found perhaps only in the history of
organic evolution.

[Note: It should, however, be possible to construct learning mechanisms

which can select for themselves reasonably good training sequences from
an always complex environment, by pre-arranging a relatively slow
development or "maturation" of tile system's facilities. 'This might be
done by pre-arranging that the sequence of goals attempted by, the
primary trainer match reasonably well, at each stage, the complexity of
performance mechanically available to the pattern-recognition and other
parts of the system. One might be able to do much of this by simply
limiting the depth of hierarchical activity, perhaps only later permitting
limited recursive activity.]

And even there, if we accept the general view of Darlington [56] who
emphasizes the heuristic aspects of genetic systems, we must have
developed early in, e.g., the phenomena of meiosis and crossing-over, quite
highly specialized mechanisms providing for the segregation of groupings
related to solutions of subproblems. Recently, much effort has been
devoted to the construction of training sequences about programming
"teaching machines." Naturally, the psychological literature abounds with
theories of how complex behavior is built up from simpler. In our own
area, perhaps the work of Solomonoff [55], while overly cryptic, shows the
most thorough consideration of this dependency, on training sequences.
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IV. PROBLEM-SOLVING AND PLANNING

Summary—The solution, by machine, of very complex problems will

require a variety of administration facilities. During the course of solving
a problem, one becomes involved with a large assembly of interrelated
subproblems. From these, at each stage, a very few must be chosen for
investigation. This decision must be based on 1) estimates of relative
difficulties and 2) estimates of centrality of the different candidates for
attention. Following subproblem selection (for which several heuristic
methods are proposed), one must choose methods appropriate to the
selected problems. But for very difficult problems, even these step-by-step
heuristics for reducing search will fail, and the machine must have
resources for analyzing the problem structure in the large-in short, for
"planning." We discuss a variety of schemes for planning, including the
use of models-analogous, semantic, and abstract. Certain abstract models
which I call "Character Algebras" can be constructed by the machine
itself, on the basis of experience or analysis. For concreteness, the
discussion begins with a description of a simple but significant system
(LT) which encounters some of these problems.

A. The "Logic Theory" Program of Newell, Shaw and Simon

It is not surprising that the testing grounds for early work on mechanical
problem solving have usually been areas of mathematics, or games, in
which the rules are learned with absolute clarity. The "Logic 'Theory,"
machine of [57] and [58], called "LT", was a first attempt to prove
theorems in logic, by frankly heuristic methods. Although the program was
not by human standards a brilliant success (and did not surpass its
designers), it stands as a landmark both in heuristic programming and in
the development of modern automatic programming.

The problem domain here is that of discovering Proofs in the Russell-

Whitehead system for the Propositional Calculus. That system is given as a
set of (five) axioms and (three) rules of inference; the latter specify how
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certain transformations can be applied to produce new theorems from old

theorems and axioms.

The LT program is centered on the idea of "working backwards" to find am

proof. Given a theorem T to be proved, LT searches among the axioms and
previously established theorems for one from which T can be deduced by a
single application of one of three simple "Methods" (which embody the
given rules of inference). If one is found, the problem is solved. Or the
search might fail completely. But finally, the search may yield one or more
"problems" which are usually propositions from which T many be deduced
directly. If one of these can, in turn, be proved a theorem the main problem
will be solved. (The situation is actually slightly more complex.) Each such
subproblem is adjoined to the "subproblem list" (after a limited preliminary
attempt) and LT works around to it later. The full power of LT, such as it is,
can be applied to each subproblem, for LT can use itself as a subroutine in
a recursive fashion.
'The heuristic technique of working backwards yields something of a
teleological process, and LT is a forerunner of more complex systems
which construct hierarchies of goals and subgoals. Even so, the basic
administrative structure of the program is no more than a nested set of
searches through lists in memory. We shall first outline this structure and
then mention a few heuristics that were used in attempts to improve
performance

1. Take the next problem from problem list.

---------(If list is empty, EXIT with failure.)
2. Choose the next of the three basic Methods.
--------- (If no more methods, go to 1.)
3. Choose the next of the list of axioms and previous theorems.
--------- (If no more, go to 2.)
--------- Apply current Method to selected axiom or theorem.
--------- If problem is solved, EXIT with complete proof.
--------- If no result, go to 3.
--------- If new subproblem arises, go to 4.
4) Try the special (substitution) Method on the subproblem.
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--------- If problem is solved, EXIT with complete proof.

--------- If not, append subproblem to problem list and go to 3.

Among the heuristics that were studied were 1) a similarity test to reduce
the work in step 4 (which includes another search through the theorem list),
2) a simplicity test to select apparently easier problems from the problem
list, and 3) a strong nonprovability test to remove from the problem list
expressions which are probably false and hence not provable. In a series of
experiments "learning" was used to find which earlier theorems had been
most useful and should be given priority in step 3. We cannot review the
effects of these changes in detail. Of interest was the balance between the
extra cost for administration of certain heuristics and the resultant search
reductions; this balance was quite delicate in some cases when computer
memory became saturated. The system seemed to be quite sensitive to the
training sequence--the order in which problems were given. And some
heuristics that gave no significant overall improvement did nevertheless
affect the class of solvable problems. Curiously enough, the general
efficiency of LT was not greatly improved by any or all of these devices.
But all this practical experience is reflected in the design of the much more
sophisticated "GPS" system described briefly in Section IV-D, 2).

Hao Wang [59] has criticized the LT project on the grounds that there exist,
as he and others have shown, mechanized proof methods which, for the
particular run of problems considered, use far less machine effort than does
LT and which have the advantage that they will ultimately find a proof for
any provable proposition. (LT does not have this exhaustive "decision
procedure" character and can fail ever to find proofs for some theorems.)
The authors of [58], perhaps unaware of the existence of even moderately
efficient exhaustive methods, supported their arguments by comparison
with a particularly inefficient exhaustive procedure. Nevertheless, I feel
that some of Wang's criticisms are misdirected. He does not seem to
recognize that the authors of LT are not so much interested in proving these
theorems as they are in the general problem of solving difficult problems.
The combinatorial system of Russell and Whitehead (with which LT deals)
is far less simple and elegant than the system used by Wang. (Note, e.g.,
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the emphasis in [49] and [60]. Wang's procedure [59] too, works
backwards, and can be regarded as a generalization of the method of
"falsification" for deciding truth-functional tautology. In [93] and its
unpublished sequel, Wang introduces more powerful methods for solving
harder problems.]

Wang's problems, while logically equivalent, are formally much simpler.

His methods do not include any facilities for using previous results (hence
they are sure to degrade rapidly at a certain level of problem complexity),
while LT is fundamentally oriented around this problem. Finally, because
of the very effectiveness of Wang's method on the particular set of
theorems in question, he simply did not have to face the fundamental
heuristic problem of when to decide to give up on a line of attack. Thus, the
formidable performance of his program [59] perhaps diverted his attention
from heuristic problems that must again spring up when real mathematics
is ultimately encountered.

This is not meant as a rejection of the importance of Wang's work and

discussion. He and others working on 'mechanical mathematics' have
discovered that there are proof procedures which are much more efficient
than has been suspected. Such work will unquestionably help inn
constructing intelligent machines, and these procedures will certainly be
preferred, when available, to "unreliable heuristic methods." Wang, Davis
and Putnam, and several others are now pushing these new techniques into
the far more challenging domain of theorem proving in the predicate
calculus (for which exhaustive decision procedures are no longer
available). We have no space to discuss this area, [See [61] and [93]] but it
seems clear that a program to solve real mathematical problems will have
to combine the mathematical sophistication of Wang with the heuristic
sophistication of Newell, Shaw and Simon.

All these efforts are directed toward the reduction of search effort. In that
sense, they are all heuristic programs. Since practically no one still uses
"heuristic" in a sense opposed to "algorithmic, serious workers might do
well to avoid pointless argument on this score. The real problem is to find
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methods that significantly delay the apparently inevitable exponential

growth of search trees.

B. Heuristics for Subproblem Selection

In designing a problem-solving system, the programmer often comes

equipped with a set of more or less distinct "Methods'"—his real task is to
find an efficient way for the program to decide where and when the
different methods are to be used.
Methods, which do not dispose of a problem, may still transform it to
create new problems or subproblems. Hence, during the course of solving
one problem we may become involved with a large assembly of
interrelated subproblems. A "parallel" computer yet to be conceived, might
work on many at a time. But even the parallel machine must have
procedures to allocate its resources because it cannot simultaneously apply
all its methods to all the problems. We shall divide this administrative
problem into two parts: the selection of those subproblem(s) which seem
most critical, attractive, or otherwise immediate, and, in the next section,
the choice of which method to apply to the selected problem.

In the basic program for LT (Section IV-.X), subproblem selection is very

simple. New problems are examined briefly and (if not solved at once) are
placed at the end of the (linear) problem list. The main program proceeds
along this list (step 1), attacking the problems in the order of their
generation; more powerful systems will have to be more judicious (both in
generation and in selection of problems) for only thus can excessive
branching be restrained. [Note that the simple scheme of LT has the
property that each generated problem will eventually get attention, even if
several are created in a step 3. If one were to turn full attention to each
problem, as generated, one might never return to alternate branches.] In
more complex systems we can expect to consider for each subproblem, at
least these two aspects: 1) its apparent "centrality-"—how will its solution
promote the main goal, and 2) its apparent "difficulty"—how much effort is
it liable too consume. We need heuristic methods to estimate each of these
quantities and further, to select accordingly one of the problems and
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allocate to it some reasonable quantity of effort. [One will want to see if

the considered problem is the same as one already considered or very
similar. See the discussion in [62]. This problem might be handled more
generally by simply remembering the (Characters of) problems that have
been attacked, and checking new ones against this memory, e.g., by
methods of [31], looking more closely if there seems to be a match.] Little
enough is known about these matters, and so it is not entirely for lack of
space that the following remarks are somewhat cryptic.

Imagine that the problems and their relations are arranged to form some
kind of directed-graph structure [14], [57], and [62]. The main problem is
to establish a "valid" path between two initially distinguished nodes.
Generation of new problems is represented by the addition of new, not-yet-
valid paths, or by the insertion of new nodes in old paths. Associate with
each connection, quantities describing its current validity state (solved,
plausible, doubtful, etc.) and its current estimated difficulty.

Global Methods: The most general problem-selection methods are

"global"—at each step, they look over the entire structure. There is one
such simple scheme that works well on at least one rather degenerate
interpretation of our problem graph. This is based on an electrical analogy
suggested to us by a machine designed by C. E. Shannon to play a variant
of the game marketed as "Hex" but known among mathematicians as
"Nash". (In [63], Shannon describes a variety of interesting game-playing
and learning machines.) The initial board position can be represented as a
certain network of resistors.

This game is played on a network of equal resistors. One player's goal is to

construct a short-circuit path between two given boundaries; the opponent
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tries to open the circuit between them. Each move consists of shorting (or
opening), irreversibly, one of the remaining resistors. Shannon's machine
applies a potential between the boundaries and selects that resistor which
carries the largest current. Very roughly speaking, this resistor is likely to
be most critical because changing it will have the largest effect on the
resistance of the net and, hence, in the goal direction of shorting (or
opening) the circuit. And although this argument is not perfect, nor is this a
perfect model of the real combinatorial situation, the machine does play
extremely well. For example, if the machine begins by opening resistor 1,
the opponent might counter by shorting resistor 4 (which now has the
largest current). The remaining move-pairs (if both players use that
strategy)—would be (5,8) (9,13) (6,3) (12, 10)—or (12, 2)—and the
machine wins. This strategy can make unsound moves in certain situations,
but no one seems to have been able to force this during a game. [Note:
after writing this, I did find such a strategy, that defeats large-board
versions of this machine.]

The use of such a global method for problem-selection requires that the
available "difficulty estimates" for related subproblems be arranged to
combine in roughly the manner of resistance values. Also, we could regard
this machine as using an "analog models for "planning." (See Section IV-
D.) [A variety of combinatorial methods will be matched against the
network-analogy opponent in a program being completed by R. Silver at
the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.]

Local and Hereditary Methods

The prospect of having to study at each step the whole problem structure is
discouraging, especially since the structure usually changes only slightly
after each attempt. One naturally looks for methods which merely update
or modify a small fragment of the stored record. A variety of compromises
lie between the extremes of the "first-come-first-served" problem-list
method and the full global-survey methods, techniques. Perhaps the most

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attractive of these are what we will call Inheritance methods —essentially

recursive devices.

In an Inheritance method, the effort assigned to a subproblem is determined

only by its immediate ancestry; at the time each problem is created, it is
assigned a certain total quantity Q of time or effort. When a problem is
later split into subproblems, such quantities are assigned to them by some
local process which depends only on their relative merits and on what
remains of Q. Thus the centrality problem is managed implicitly. Such
schemes are quite easy to program, especially with the new programming
systems such as IPL [64] and LISP [32], which are themselves based on
certain hereditary or recursive operations. Special cases of the inheritance
method arise when one can get along with a simple all-or-none Q— e.g., a
"stop condition.'' This yields the exploratory method called "back-tracking"
by Solomon Golumb [65]. The decoding procedure of Jack Wozencraft
[66] is another important variety of Inheritance method.

In the complex exploration process proposed for chess by Newell, Shaw,

and Simon [49], we have a form of Inheritance method with a non-
numerical stop-condition. Here, the subproblems inherit sets of goals to be
achieved. This teleological control has to be administered by all additional
goal-selection system and is further complicated by a global (but
reasonably simple) stop rule of the backing-up variety [Section III-C].
(Note: we are identifying here the move-tree-limitation problem with that
of problem-selection.) Although extensive experimental results are not yet
available, we feel that the scheme of [49] deserves careful study by anyone
planning serious work in this area. It shows only the beginning of the
complexity sure to come in our development of intelligent machines. Some
further discussion of this question may be found in Slagle [67].

C. "Character-Method" Machines

Once a problem is selected, we must decide which method to try first. This
depends on our ability to classify or characterize problems. We first
compute the Character of our problem (by using some pattern recognition
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technique) and then consult a "Character: -Method" table or other device

which is supposed to tell us which method(s) are most effective on
problems of that Character. This information might be built up from
experience, given initially by the programmer, deduced from "advice" [70],
or obtained as the solution to some other problem, as suggested in the GPS
proposal [68]. In any case, this part of the machine's behavior, regarded
from the outside, can be treated as a sort of stimulus-response, or "table
look-up," activity.
If the Characters (or descriptions) have too wide a variety of values, there
will be a serious problem of filling a Character-Method table. One might
then have to reduce the detail of information, e.g., by using only a few
important properties. Thus the Differences of GPS [see Section IV-D, 2)]
describe no more than is necessary to define a single goal, and a priority
scheme selects just one of these to characterize the situation. Gelernter and
Rochester [62] suggest using a property-weighting scheme, a special case
of the "Bayes net" described in Section II-G.

D. Planning

Ordinarily one can solve a complicated problem only by dividing it into a

number of parts, each of which can be attacked by a smaller search (or be
further divided). A successful division will reduce the search time not by a
mere fraction, but by a fractional exponent. In a graph with 10 branches
descending from each node, a 20-step search might involve 1020 trials,
which is out of the question, while the insertion of just four lemmas or
sequential subgoals might reduce the search to only 5*104 trials, which is
within reason for machine exploration. Thus, it will be worth a relatively
enormous effort to find such "islands" in the solution of complex problems.
See section 10 of [6]. Note that even if one encountered, say, 106 failures
of such procedures before success, one would still have gained a factor of
perhaps 1010 in overall trial reduction! Thus practically any ability at all
to "plan," or "analyze," a problem will be profitable, if the problem is
difficult. It is safe to say that all simple, unitary, notions of how to build an
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intelligent machine will fail, rather sharply, for some modest level of
problem difficulty. Only schemes which actively pursue an analysis toward
obtaining a set of sequential goals can be expected to extend smoothly into
increasingly complex problem domains.

Perhaps the most straightforward concept of planning is that of using a

simplified model of the problem situation. Suppose that there is available,
for a given problem, some other problem of "essentially the same
character" but with less detail and complexity. Then we could proceed first
to solve the simpler problem. Suppose, also, that this is done using a
second set of methods, which are also simpler, but in some correspondence
with those for the original. The solution to the simpler problem can then be
used as a "plan" for the harder one. Perhaps each step will have to be
expanded in detail. But the multiple searches will add, not multiply, in the
total search time. The situation would be ideal if the model were,
mathematically, a homomorphism of the original. But even without such
perfection, the model solution should be a valuable guide. In mathematics,
one's proof procedures usually run along these lines: one first assumes,
e.g., that integrals and limits always converge, in the planning stage. Once
the outline is completed, ill this simple-minded model of mathematics, then
one goes back to try to "make rigorous" the steps of the proof, i.e., to
replace them by chains of argument using genuine rules of inference. And
even if the plan fails, it may be possible to patch it by replacing just a few
of its steps.

Another aid to planning' is the semantic, as opposed to the homomorphic,

model [14], [9]. Here we may have an interpretation of the current problem
within another system, not necessarily simpler, but with which we are more
familiar and for which we know methods that are more powerful. Thus, in
connection with a plan for the proof of a theorem, we will want to know
whether the proposed lemmas, or islands in the proof, are actually true. If
not, the plan will surely fail. We can often easily tell if a proposition is true
by looking at an interpretation. Thus the truth of a proposition from plane
geometry can be supposed, at least with great reliability, by actual
measurement of a few constructed drawings (or the analytic geometry
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equivalent). The geometry machine of Gelernter and Rochester [62], [69]

uses such a semantic model with excellent results; it follows closely the
lines proposed in [14].

The "Character-Algebra" Model: Planning with the aid of a model is of the

greatest value in reducing search. Can w e construct machines that find
their own models? I believe the following will provide a general,
straightforward way to construct certain kinds of useful abstract models.
The critical requirement is that we be able to compile a "Character-Method
Matrix" (in addition to the simple Character-Method table in Section IV-C.
The CM matrix is an array of entries, which predict with some reliability
what, will happen when methods are applied to problems. Both of the
matrix dimensions are indexed by problem Characters; if there is a method
which usually transforms problems of character C, into problems of
character Cj then let the matrix entry Cij be the name of that method (or a
list of such methods). If there is no such method, the corresponding entry is
null.

Now suppose that there is no entry for Cij—meaning that we have no

direct way to transform a problem of type Ci into one of type Cj. Multiply
the matrix by itself. If the new matrix has a non-null (i, j) entry then there
must be a sequence of two methods which effects the desired
transformation. If that fails, we may try higher powers. Note that [if we put
unity for the (i, i) terms] we can reach the 2**2**n matrix power with just
n multiplications. We don't need to define the symbolic multiplication
operation; one may instead use arithmetic entries putting unity for any non-
null entry and zero for any null entry in the original matrix. This yields a
simple connection, or flow diagram, matrix, and its nth power tells us
something about its set of paths of length 2**n. See, e.g., [88]. (Once a
non-null entry is discovered, there exist efficient ways to find the
corresponding sequences of methods. The problem is just that of finding
paths through a maze, and the method of Moore [71] would be quite
efficient. Almost any problem can be converted into a problem of finding a
chain between two terminal expressions in some formal system.) If the
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Characters are taken to be abstract representations of the problem

expressions, this "Character-Algebra'' model can be as abstract as are the
available pattern-recognition facilities. See [14] and [9].

The critical problem in using the Character-Algebra model for planning is,
of course, the prediction-reliability of the matrix entries. One cannot expect
the Character of a result to be strictly determined by the Character of the
original and the method used. And the reliability of the predictions will, in
any case, deteriorate rapidly as the matrix power is raised. But, as we have
noted, any plan at all is so much better than none that the system should do
very much better than exhaustive search, even with quite poor prediction
quality.

This matrix formulation is obviously only a special case of the character

planning idea. More generally, one will have descriptions, rather than fixed
characters, and one must then have more general methods to calculate from
a description what is likely to happen when a method is applied.

Characters and Differences: In the GPS (General Problem Solver)

proposal of Newell, Shaw, and Simon [68], [15], we find a slightly
different framework: they use a notion of Difference between two
problems (or expressions) where we speak of the Character of a single
problem. These views are equivalent if we take our problems to be links or
connections between expressions. But this notion of Difference (as the
Character of a pair) does lend itself more smoothly to teleological
reasoning. For what is the goal defined by a problem but to reduce the
"difference" between the present state and the desired state? The
underlying structure of GPS is precisely what we have called a "Character-
Method Ma-chine" in which each kind of Difference is associated in a table
with one or more methods which are known to "reduce" that Difference.
Since the characterization here depends always on 1) the current problem
expression and 2) the desired end result, it is reasonable to think, as its
authors suggest, of GPS as using "means- end" analysis.

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To illustrate the use of Differences, we shall review an example [15]. The

problem, in elementary propositional calculus, is to prove that from S and
(not P implies Q) we can deduce (Q or P) and S. The program looks at
both at these expressions with a recursive matching process which
branches out from the main connectives. The first Difference it encounters
is that S occurs on different sides of the main connective "and". It therefore
looks in the Difference-Method table under the heading ''change position."
It discovers there a method which uses the theorem (A and B) =(B and A)
which is obviously useful for removing, or "reducing," differences of
position. GPS applies this method, obtaining (not P implies Q) and S. Then
GPS asks what is the Difference between this new expression and the goal.
This time the matching procedure gets down into the connectives inside the
left-hand members and finds a Difference between the connectives
"implies" and "or". It now looks in the C-M table under the heading
"Change Connective" and discovers an appropriate method using not A
implies B = A or B. It applies this method, obtaining (P or Q) and S. In the
final cycle, the difference-evaluating procedure discovers the need for a
"change position" inside the left member' and applies a method using (A or
B) = (B or A). This completes the solution of the problem.

Compare this with the "matching,' process described in [57]. The notions
of "Character," "Character-Algebra," etc., originate in [14] but seem useful
in describing parts of the "GPS', system of [57] and [151. Reference [15]
contains much additional material we cannot survey here. Essentially, GPS
is to be self-applied to the problem of discovering sets of Differences
appropriate for given problem areas. This notion of "bootstrapping"—that
is, applying a problem-solving system to the task of improving some of its
own methods—is old and famil1ar, but in [15] we find perhaps the first
specific proposal about how such an advance might be realized.

Evidently, the success of this "means-end" analysis in reducing general

search will depend on the degree of specificity that can be written into the
Difference-Method table—basically the same requirement for an effective
Character-Algebra.

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It may be possible to plan using Differences, as well. Imagine a

"Difference-Algebra" in which the predictions have the form D = D1D2.
One must construct accordingly a difference-factorization algebra for
discovering longer chains D=D1D2 . . . Dn and corresponding method
plans. We should note that one cannot expect to use such planning methods
with such primitive Differences as in [15]. These cannot form good
Character Algebras because (unless their expressions have many levels of
descriptive detail) their matrix powers will swiftly become degenerate.
This degeneracy will ultimately limit the capacity of any formal planning
device.

One may think of the general planning heuristic as embodied in a recursive

process of the following form.
Suppose we have a problem P:

Form a plan for problem P.

----Select first (next) step of the plan.
------- (If no more steps, exit with "success.")
----Try the suggested method(s):
---------Success: return to try next step in the plan.
---------Failure: return to form new plan, or perhaps change current plan to
avoid this step.
----Problem judged too difficult: Apply this entire procedure to the 'sub-'
problem of the current step.

Observe that such a program schema is essentially recursive; it uses itself

as a subroutine (explicitly, in the last step) in such a way that its current
state has to be stored, and restored when it returns control to itself. [This
violates, for example, the restrictions on "DO loops" in programming
systems such as FORTRAN. Convenient techniques for programming such
processes were developed by Newell, Shaw, and Simon [64]; the program
state-variables are stored in "pushdown lists" and both the program and the
data are stored in the form of "list-structures." Gelernter [69] extended
FORTRAN to manage some of this. McCarthy has extended these notions
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in LISP [32] to permit explicit recursive definitions of programs in a

language based on recursive functions of symbolic expressions. In LISP,
the management of program-state variables is fully automatic. See also
Orchard-Hays' article in this issue.]

In chapters 12 and 13 of [46], Miller, Galanter, and Pribram discuss

possible analogies between human problem solving and some heuristic
planning schemes. It seems certain that, for at least a few years, there will
be a close association between theories of human behavior and attempts to
increase the intellectual capacities of machines. But, in the long run, we
must be prepared to discover profitable lines of heuristic programming
which do not deliberately imitate human characteristics.

Limitations of space preclude detailed discussion here of theories of self-

organizing neural nets, and other models based on brain analogies. Several
of these are described or cited in [C] and [D]. This omission is not too
serious, I feel, in connection with the subject of heuristic programming,
because the motivation and methods of the two areas seem so different. Up
to the present time, at least, research on neural-net models has been
concerned mainly with the attempt to show that certain rather simple
heuristic processes e.g., reinforcement learning, or property-list pattern-
recognition, can be realized or evolved by collections of simple elements
without very highly organized interconnections. Work on heuristic
programming is characterized quite differently by the search for new, more
powerful heuristics for solving very complex problems, and by very little
concern for what hardware (neuronal or otherwise) would minimally
suffice for its realization. In short, the work on "nets" is concerned with
how far one can get with a small initial endowment; the work on "artificial
intelligence', is concerned with using all we know to build the most
powerful systems that we can. It is my expectation that, in problem-solving
power, the (allegedly brain-like) minimal-structure systems will never
threaten to compete with their more deliberately designed contemporaries,
nevertheless, their study should prove profitable in the development of
component elements and subsystems to be used in the construction of the
more systematically conceived machines.
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V. INDUCTION AND MODELS

A. Intelligence

In all of this discussion we have not come to grips with anything we can
isolate as "intelligence." We have discussed only heuristics, shortcuts, and
classification techniques. Is there something missing? I am confident that
sooner or later we will be able to assemble programs of great problem-
solving ability from complex combinations of heuristic devices-multiple
optimizers, pattern-recognition tricks, planning algebras, recursive
administration procedures, and the like. In no one of these will we find the
seat of intelligence. Should we ask what intelligence "really is"? My own
view is that this is more of an esthetic question, or one of sense of dignity,
than a technical matter! To me "intelligence" seems to denote little more
than the complex of performances which we happen to respect, but do not
understand. So it is, usually, with the question of "depth" in mathematics.
Once the proof of a theorem is really understood, its content seems to
become trivial. (Still, there may remain a sense of wonder about how the
proof was discovered.)

Programmers, too, know that there is never any "heart" in a program. There
are high-level routines in each program, but all they do is dictate that "if
such-and-such, then transfer to such-and-such a subroutine." And when we
look at the low-level subroutines, which "actually do the work," we find
senseless loops and sequences of trivial operations, merely carrying out the
dictates of their superiors. The intelligence in such a system seems to be as
intangible as becomes the meaning of a single common word when it is
thoughtfully pronounced over and over again.

But we should not let our inability to discern a locus of intelligence lead us
to conclude that programmed computers therefore cannot think. For it may
be so with man, as with machine, that, when we understand finally the
structure and program, the feeling of mystery (and self-approbation) will
weaken. See [14] and [9]. We find similar views concerning "creativity" in
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[60]. The view expressed by Rosenbloom [73] that minds (or brains) can
transcend machines is based, apparently, on an erroneous interpretation of
the meaning of the "unsolvability theorems" of Godel.

On problems of volition we are in general agreement with McCulloch [75]

that our freedom of will "presumably means no more than that we can
distinguish between what we intend [i.e., our plan], and some intervention
in our action." See also MacKay ([76] and its references); we are, however,
unconvinced by his eulogization of "analogue" devices. Concerning the
"mind-brain" problem, one should consider the arguments of Craik [77],
Hayek [78] and Pask [79]. Among the active leaders in modern heuristic
programming, perhaps only Samuel [91] has taken a strong position against
the idea of machines thinking. His argument, based on the fact that reliable
computers do only that which they are instructed to do, has a basic flaw; it
does not follow that the programmer therefore has full knowledge (and
therefore full responsibility and credit for) what will ensue. For certainly
the programmer may set up an evolutionary system whose limitations are
for him unclear and possibly incomprehensible. No better does the
mathematician know all the consequences of a proposed set of axioms.
Surely a machine has to be in order to perform. But we cannot assign all
the credit to its programmer if the operation of a system comes to reveal
structures not recognizable or anticipated by the programmer. While we
have not yet seen much in the way of intelligent activity in machines,
Samuel's arguments in [91] (circular in presuming that machines do not
have minds) do not assure us against this. Turing [72] gives a very
knowledgeable discussion of such matters.

B. Inductive Inference

Let us pose now for our machines, a variety of problems more challenging
than any ordinary game or mathematical puzzle. Suppose that we want a
ma chine which, when embedded for a time in a complex environment or
"universe," will essay to produce a description of that world-to discover its
regularities or laws of nature. We might ask it to predict what will happen
next. We might ask it to predict what would be the likely consequences of a
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certain action or experiment. Or we might ask it to formulate the laws

governing some class of events. In any case, our task is to equip our
machine with inductive ability-with methods, which it can use to construct
general statements about events beyond its recorded experience. Now,
there can be no system for inductive inference that will work well in all
possible universes. But given a universe, or an ensemble of universes, and
a criterion of success, this (epistemological) problem for machines
becomes technical rather than philosophical. There is quite a literature
concerning this subject, but we shall discuss only one approach which
currently seems to us the most promising; this is what we might call the
"grammatical induction" schemes of Solomonoff [55], [16], [17], based
partly on work of Chomsky and Miller [80], [81].

We will take language to mean the set of expressions formed from some
given set of primitive symbols or expressions, by the repeated application
of some given set of rules; the primitive expressions plus the rules is the
grammar of the language. Most induction problems can be framed as
problems in the discovery of grammars. Suppose, for instance, that a
machine's prior experience is summarized by a large collection of
statements, some labeled "good" and some 'bad" by some critical device.
How could we generate selectively more good statements? The trick is to
find some relatively simple (formal) language in which the good statements
are grammatical, and in which the bad ones are not. Given such a language,
we can use it to generate more statements, and presumably these will tend
to be more like the good ones. The heuristic argument is that if we can find
a relatively simple way to separate the two sets, the discovered rule is
likely to be useful beyond the immediate experience. If the extension fails
to be consistent with new data, one might be able to make small changes in
the rules and, generally, one may be able to use many ordinary problem-
solving methods for this task.

The problem of finding an efficient grammar is much the same as that of

finding efficient encodings, or programs, for machines; in each case, one
needs to discover the important regularities in the data, and exploit the
regularities by making shrewd abbreviations. The possible importance of
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Solomonoff's work [18] is that it may point the way toward systematic
mathematical ways to explore this discovery problem. He considers the
class of all programs (for a given general-purpose computer) which will
produce a certain given output (the body of data in question). Most such
programs, if allowed to continue, will add to that body of data. By properly
weighting these programs, perhaps by length, we can obtain corresponding
weights for the different possible continuations, and thus a basis for
prediction. If this prediction is to be of any interest, it will be necessary to
show some independence of the given computer; it is not yet clear
precisely what form such a result will take.

C. Models of Oneself

If a creature can answer a question about a hypothetical experiment,

without actually performing that experiment, then the answer must have
been obtained from some submachine inside the creature. The output of
that submachine (representing a correct answer) as well as the input
(representing the question) must be coded descriptions of the
corresponding external events or event classes. Seen through this pair of
encoding and decoding channels, the internal submachine acts like the
environment, and so it has the character of a "model." The inductive
inference problem may then be regarded as the problem of constructing
such a model.

To the extent that the creature's actions affect the environment, this internal
model of the world will need to include some representation of the creature
itself. If one asks the creature "why did you decide to do such and such"
(or if it asks this of itself), any answer must come from the internal model.
Thus the evidence of introspection itself is liable to be based ultimately on
the processes used in constructing one's image of one's self. Speculation on
the form of such a model leads to the amusing prediction that intelligent
machines may be reluctant to believe that they are just machines. The
argument is this: our own self-models have a substantially "dual" character;
there is a part concerned with the physical or mechanical environment (that
is, with the behavior of inanimate objects)—and there is a part concerned
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with social and psychological matters. It is precisely because we have not

yet developed a satisfactory mechanical theory of mental activity that we
have to keep these areas apart. We could not give up this division even if
we wished to—until we find a unified model to replace it.

Now, when we ask such a creature what sort of being it is, it cannot simply
answer "directly." It must inspect its model(s). And it must answer by
saying that it seems to be a dual thing-which appears to have two parts-a
"mind" and a "body." Thus, even the robot, unless equipped with a
satisfactory theory of artificial intelligence, would have to maintain a
dualistic opinion on this matter.

There is a certain problem of infinite regression in the notion of a machine

having a good model of itself: of course, the nested models must lose detail
and finally vanish. But the argument, e.g., of Hayek (See 8.69 and 8.79 of
[78]) —that we cannot "fully comprehend the unitary order" (of our own
minds)— ignores the power of recursive description. In particular, it
overlooks Turing's demonstration that (with sufficient external writing
space) a "general-purpose" machine can answer any question about a
description of itself that any larger machine could answer.

CONCLUSION

In attempting to combine a survey of work on "artificial intelligence" with

a summary of our own views, we could not mention every relevant project
and publication. Some important omissions are in the area of 'brain
models"; the early work of Belmont Farley and Wesley Clark [92] (also
Farley's paper in [D], often unknowingly duplicated, and the work of
Nathaniel Rochester [82] and Peter Milner [D].) The work of Jerome
Lettvin, et al. [83] is related to the theories in [19]. We did not touch at all
on the problems of logic and language, and of information retrieval, which
must be faced when action is to be based on the contents of large
memories; see, e.g., John McCarthy [701. We have not discussed the basic
results in mathematical logic that bear on the question of what can be done
by machines. There are entire literatures we have hardly even sampled-the
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bold pioneering of Nicholas Rashevsky (c. 1929) and his later co-workers
[95]; Theories of Learning, e.g., Saul Gorn [84]; Theory of Games, e.g.,
Martin Shubik [85]; and Psychology, e.g., Jerome Bruner, et al. [861. And
everyone should know the work of George Polya [87] on how to solve
problems. We can hope only to have transmitted the flavor of some of the
more ambitious projects directly concerned with getting machines to take
over a larger portion of problem-solving tasks.

One last remark: we have discussed here only work concerned with more
or less self-contained problem solving programs. But as this is written, we
are at last beginning to see vigorous activity in the direction of constructing
usable time-sharing or multiprogramming computing systems. With these
systems, it will at last become economical to match human beings in real
time with really large machines. This means that we can work toward
programming what will be, in effect, "thinking aids." In the years to come,
we expect that these man-machine systems will share, and perhaps for a
time be dominant, in our advance toward the development of "artificial
intelligence."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Work in this area seems to be currently prominent in the following

periodicals:
1) IBM J. Res. & Dev.
2) Information and Control.
3) Proc. EJCC and WJCC (Eastern and Western Joint Computer
Conferences.)
4) IRE National Convention Record.
5) J. Assoc. Comp. Mach. (JACM).
6) Trans. Assoc. Comp. Mach. TACM)
7) IRE Transactions on Information Theory
A more informative bibliography, by the present author should appear
shortly in the IRE Trans. on Human Factors in Electronics. NOTE: That
bibliography appeared in
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Marvin Minsky, "A Selected Descriptor-Indexed Bibliography to the

Literature on Artificial Intelligence," IRE Transactions on Human Factors
in Electronics, HFE-2, March 1961, pp. 39-55. Reprinted in Computers
and Thought, Ed. E.A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman, pp. 453-524,
McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Many citations below were published in these volumes:

[A] Proc. WJCC, March 1955.

[B] "Automata Studies," C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Eds. Princeton
Univ. Press, Princeton, N. J., 1956.
[C] Proc. Symp. On Mechanization of Thought Processes, Her Majesty's
Stationery Office, London, 1959.
[D] "Self-Organizing Systems," M. T. Yovitts and S. Cameron, Eds.,
Pergamon Press, New York, N. Y., 1960.
[E] Proc. Intl. Conf. on Information Processing, UNESCO House, Paris,
1959
[F] Proc. EJCC, December 1959.
[G] Comm. ACM, vol. 3, April 1960. (Preprints of Conf. on Symbol
Manipulation Programs.)
[H] Fourth London Symp. on Information Theory, C. Cherry, Ed.
[J] Third London Symp. on Information Theory, C. Cherry, Ed., Academic
Press, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1956.
[K] J.R. Newman, Ed., "The World of Mathematics," Simon and Schuster,
Inc., New York, N. Y., 1956.
[L] IRE Trans. On Information Theory, vol. IF-2, September 1956
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dimensional Patterns: A Survey of the Field" U. S. Naval Electronics Lab.,

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