Introduction

Edmund Furse has been working for over ten years trying to understand how university students understand pure mathematics. He has chosen this rather obscure subject because his first degree was in maths with physics, and he did a PhD in pure mathematics, so has some personal experience, before he went on to study Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science.

Whilst at Warwick University's Psychology department as a research fellow funded by GEC, Furse taught part of a master's course in Cognitive Science, and gave the course on machine learning. He was very dissatisfied with the very small scale learning that was modelled by all the different approaches, and felt it did not do real justice to the human condition. Hence, began his search for a model of learning that dealt with learning over months and years, rather than just a few seconds or minutes, and that could handle the learning of thousands of facts, or even millions.

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