Learning Facts

Furse, then is pioneering a new theory of learning and memory, known as the Contextual Memory System (CMS). This is essentially a model of how people learn facts. It is a model of declarative learning, and also a simple model of both perception and attention.

The difficult problem in trying to understand the nature of the learning of facts, is how can one possibly learn something new? This is a very old problem going back to the Greeks. Meno's paradox, the 'learning paradox' derives from the ancient Greek sophists who argued that truly novel learning was impossible in that "novel knowledge cannot be derived completely from old knowledge, or it would not be new. Yet the transcending part of it cannot be completely new either, for then it could never be understood."

This problem was revisited in the 1950s by Arthur Samuel when whilst working for IBM he developed a model of how people learn to play the game of draughts. He built a model with a fixed set of 32 features, and the system learned which subset of features of the board was most useful, and what weight to assign to them. But he searched in vain for a method of creating the terms (features) from scratch, and called this problem "the problem of the creation of new terms". This has remained a central problem in machine learning with workers such as Tom Mitchell highlighting its importance in the 1980s.

Furse proposes that the solution to the problem is that the features must come from the environment itself, rather than inside the agent. In a prize winning paper at the British AI conference of 1993, "Escaping from the Box", Furse argued that nearly all models of learning tended to pre-characterise the space in which learning was to take place, a sort of set of pigeon holes decided in advance. Then, learning was to remember which pigeon hole the new information was to go into. This, he argued was a totally inadequate account of the human experience of learning. We do not decide in advance all the different characteristics of birds before we start to learn about them; rather we pick up our knowledge of birds and their features in a haphazard way dictated by our interests and experience of the world.

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