A Biologically-Inspired Perspective on Commonsense Knowledge

Abstract

Since the seminal papers by John McCarthy [1,2], the problem to design intelligent systems able to handle common sense knowledge has become a real puzzle [3,6,7]. According to the McCarthy and Hayes suggestion, “The first task [to construct a general intelligent computer program] is to define even a naive, common-sense view of the world precisely enough to program a computer to act accordingly. This is a very difficult task in itself” [5]: 6. Perhaps the frame problem, i.e., how can a representational system deal with the enormous amount of knowledge that is necessary to everyday behaviour, needs nowadays a new account. The BICA challenge, that is, the challenge to make a general purpose and computational equivalent of the human intelligence by means of an approach based on biologically inspired cognitive architectures, can be considered as an example of this kind of new perspective [1,8].