Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office
December 10, 2015

Excerpt from the article:

"Researchers at MIT, New York University, and the University of Toronto have developed a computer system whose ability to produce a variation of a character in an unfamiliar writing system, on the first try, is indistinguishable from that of humans.

...

“In the current AI landscape, there’s been a lot of focus on classifying patterns,” says Josh Tenenbaum, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences at MIT, a principal investigator in the MIT Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, and one of the new system’s co-developers. “But what’s been lost is that intelligence isn’t just about classifying or recognizing; it’s about thinking.”

“This is partly why, even though we’re studying hand-written characters, we’re not shy about using a word like ‘concept,’” he adds. “Because there are a bunch of things that we do with even much richer, more complex concepts that we can do with these characters. We can understand what they’re built out of. We can understand the parts. We can understand how to use them in different ways, how to make new ones.” "