Vector Symbolic Architectures A New Building Material for

Vector Symbolic Architectures: A New Building Material for AGI Simon D. Levy Washington & Lee University Lexington, Virginia, USA Ross Gayler Veda Advantage Value Solutions Melbourne, Australia

The Yin & Yang of Intelligence

The Need for New Representational Principles • Ecological affordances (Gibson 1979) • Distributed/Connectionist Representations (PDP 1986) • Holographic Representations (Gabor 1971; Plate 2003) • Fractals / Attractors / Dynamical Systems (Tabor 2000; Levy & Pollack 2001)

Fractal RAAM

The Appeal of Connectionism (Rumelhart & Mc. Clelland 1986)

WALKED WALK

ROARED ROAR

SPOKE SPEAK

WENT GO

Mary won’t give John the time of day. ignores(mary, john)

The Binding Problem + ? ?

Solution? Local Representations

Local Representations

The Problem of Two ?

The Problem of Variables ignores(X, Y) X won’t give Y the time of day.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (Plate 1991; Kanerva 1994; Gayler 1998)

Tensor Product Binding (Smolensky 1990)

Binding

Bundling + =

Unbinding (query)

Lossy

Lossy

Cleanup Hebbian / Hopfield / Attractor Net

Reduction

Composition / Recursion

Variables john X

Current Applications • Modeling Surface and Structural Properties in Analogy Processing (Eliasmith & Thagard 2001) • Variables & Quantification / Wason Task (Eliasmith 2005) • Representing Word Order in a Holographic Lexicon (Jones & Mewhort 2007)

Future Work: Banish the Homunculus MSC (Arathorn 2002)

Future Work: Banish the Homunculus MSC (Arathorn 2002)