Speculative Concept Formation

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of general intelligence is its capability to deal with novelty in its environment and/or goal-set. And dealing with novelty intrinsically requires creating novelty. It’s impossible to efficiently handle new situations without creating new ideas appropriately. Thus, in any environment complex and dynamic enough to support human-like general intelligence (or any other kind of highly powerful general intelligence), the creation of novel ideas will be paramount. New idea creation takes place in OpenCog via a variety of methods—e.g. inside MOSES which creates new program trees, PLN which creates new logical relationships, ECAN which creates new associative relationships, etc. But there is also a role for explicit, purposeful creation of new Atoms representing new concepts, outside the scope of these other learning mechanisms.