This book stresses the use of learning, and in particular perceptual learning, to develop thinking entities.

This book stresses the use of learning, and in particular perceptual learning, to develop thinking entities.

We met because we both share the same views of language. Language is a living organism, produced by neural mechanisms relating in large numbers as a society. Language exists between minds, as a way of communicating between them, not as an autonomous process. The logical 'rules' seem to us an epiphe nomena ·of the neural mechanism, rather than an essential component in language. This view of language has been advocated by an increasing number of workers, as the view that language is simply a collection of logical rules has had less and less success. People like Yorick Wilks have been able to show in paper after paper that almost any rule which can be devised can be shown to have exceptions. The meaning does not lie in the rules. David Powers is a teacher of computer science. Christopher Turk, like many workers who have come into the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) was originally trained in literature. He moved into linguistics, and then into computational linguistics. In 1983 he took a sabbatical in Roger Shank's AI project in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. Like an earlier visitor to the project, John Searle from California, Christopher Turk was increasingly uneasy at the view of language which was used at Yale.

The development of computational models of design founded on the artificial intelligenceparadigm has provided an impetus for muchofcurrentdesign research. As artificial intelligence has matured and developed new approaches so the impact ofthese new approaches on design research has been felt. This can be seen in the wayconcepts from cognitive science has found theirway into artificial intelligence and hence into design research. And, also in the way in which agent-based systems arebeingincorporated into design systems. In design research there is an increasing blurring between notions drawn from artificial intelligence and those drawn from cognitive science. Whereas a number of years ago the focus was largely on applying artificial intelligence to designing as an activity, thus treating designing as a form ofproblem solving, today we are seeing a much wider variety ofconceptions of the role of artificial intelligence in helping to model and comprehend designing as a process. Thus, we see papers in this volume which have as their focus the development or implementationofframeworks for artificial intelligence in design - attempting to determine a unique locus for these ideas. We see papers which attempt to find foundations for the development of tools based on the artificial intelligence paradigm; often the foundations come from cognitive studiesofhuman designers.