Case based reasoning as a model for cognitive artificial intelligence

Abstract

Cognitive Systems understand the world through learning and experience. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) systems naturally capture knowledge as experiences in memory and they are able to learn new experiences to retain in their memory. CBR’s retrieve and reuse reasoning is also knowledge-rich because of its nearest neighbour retrieval and analogy-based adaptation of retrieved solutions. CBR is particularly suited to domains where there is no well-defined theory, because they have a memory of experiences of what happened, rather than why/how it happened. CBR’s assumption that ‘similar problems have similar solutions’ enables it to understand the contexts for its experiences and the ‘bigger picture’ from clusters of cases, but also where its similarity assumption is challenged. Here we explore cognition and meta-cognition for CBR through self-reflection and introspection of both memory and retrieve and reuse reasoning. Our idea is to embed and exploit cognitive functionality such as insight, intuition and curiosity within CBR to drive robust, and even explainable, intelligence that will achieve problem-solving in challenging, complex, dynamic domains.