Shape Understanding System: The First Steps toward the Visual Thinking Machines (Studies in Computational Intelligence)

This book presents the results of the research in one of the most complex and difficult areas of research, such as research in the areas of thinking and understanding. This research that is carried out in the newly founded Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding is focused on research on the problem of visual understanding and visual thinking. According to our knowledge, this book is the first attempt to investigate the complexity of the visual thinking problems in the context of building the thinking machine. We are aware how complex this problem is, however, we believe that the results of our research will pave the way into the new way of thinking about designing the thinking machines and, especially, will supply the new scientific arguments about our human nature. Researchers in area of artificial intelligence do not pay sufficient attention into understanding/thinking problems. It was probably for that reason that there was no proper representation to capture visual aspects of the world in the form that could be compatible with other representations of the non-visual knowledge.