Peter D. Turney
In past work, we developed a computational model of the evolution of symbiotic entities (Model-S), based on Conway's Game of Life. In this article, we examine three trends that biologists have observed in the evolution of symbiotes. (1)…
Conway's Game of Life is the best-known cellular automaton. It is a classic model of emergence and self-organization, it is Turing-complete, and it can simulate a universal constructor. The Game of Life belongs to the set of semi-totalistic…
Recently we introduced a model of symbiosis, Model-S, based on the evolution of seed patterns in Conway's Game of Life. In the model, the fitness of a seed pattern is measured by one-on-one competitions in the Immigration Game, a two-player…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
We present a computational simulation of evolving entities that includes symbiosis with shifting levels of selection. Evolution by natural selection shifts from the level of the original entities to the level of the new symbiotic entity. In…
There are at least two kinds of similarity. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional…
It has been argued that a central objective of nanotechnology is to make products inexpensively, and that self-replication is an effective approach to very low-cost manufacturing. The research presented here is intended to be a step towards…
Many AI researchers and cognitive scientists have argued that analogy is the core of cognition. The most influential work on computational modeling of analogy-making is Structure Mapping Theory (SMT) and its implementation in the Structure…
The Immigration Game (invented by Don Woods in 1971) extends the solitaire Game of Life (invented by John Conway in 1970) to enable two-player competition. The Immigration Game can be used in a model of evolution by natural selection, where…
We introduce a dataset for studying the evolution of words, constructed from WordNet and the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dataset tracks the evolution of 4,000 synonym sets (synsets), containing 9,000 English words, from 1800 AD to 2000…
Evolution by natural selection can be seen an algorithm for generating creative solutions to difficult problems. More precisely, evolution by natural selection is a class of algorithms that share a set of properties. The question we address…
While open-domain question answering (QA) systems have proven effective for answering simple questions, they struggle with more complex questions. Our goal is to answer more complex questions reliably, without incurring a significant cost…
Inference in natural language often involves recognizing lexical entailment (RLE); that is, identifying whether one word entails another. For example, "buy" entails "own". Two general strategies for RLE have been proposed: One strategy is…
Semantic composition is the task of understanding the meaning of text by composing the meanings of the individual words in the text. Semantic decomposition is the task of understanding the meaning of an individual word by decomposing it…
There have been several efforts to extend distributional semantics beyond individual words, to measure the similarity of word pairs, phrases, and sentences (briefly, tuples; ordered sets of words, contiguous or noncontiguous). One way to…
Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are…
Knowing the degree of semantic contrast between words has widespread application in natural language processing, including machine translation, information retrieval, and dialogue systems. Manually-created lexicons focus on opposites, such…
Even though considerable attention has been given to the polarity of words (positive and negative) and the creation of large polarity lexicons, research in emotion analysis has had to rely on limited and small emotion lexicons. In this…
It has been argued that analogy is the core of cognition. In AI research, algorithms for analogy are often limited by the need for hand-coded high-level representations as input. An alternative approach is to use high-level perception, in…
Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and…