Dr. Dobb's | What Might Category Theory do for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science?

What Might Category Theory do for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science?

In August 2008, I posted a series of answers to the question "Why should we be interested in category theory?" on the A Categorical Manifesto thread in the n-Category Café blog. Category theory is a mathematical tool often used to elucidate similarities between apparently unrelated pieces of mathematics. I suggested it could do the same for AI and cognitive science, and discussed examples that include neural nets, holographic reduced representations, Prolog-stye unification, analogical reasoning, and understanding metaphors. Here is the same posting, with an informal explanation of category theory added, and the rest made intelligible (I hope) to non-category-theorists.

April 25, 2010
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/what-might-category-theory-do-for-artifi/228700165