Patrick Winston: The Story Understanding Story

Topics: Brief history of AI and arguments against the possibility of artificial intelligence; emergence of symbolic processing capability through evolution; strong story hypothesis: ability to tell, understand, recombine stories distinguishes human intelligence from that of other primates; understanding the story of MacBeth: how to answer questions about information that is not explicit, such as whether Duncan is dead at the end; use of inference rules, explanation rules, concept patterns; Genesis system for story understanding that can find connections between events, integrate cultural background of reader, answer questions about motives, assess similarity between stories, and interpret stories from different domains such as politics and conflict, e.g. understanding analogies between US-Viet Cong and Arab-Israeli conflicts; social animal hypothesis; directed perception hypothesis