This book presents the results of research into one of the most complex and difficult areas - research into thinking and understanding. The research was carried out at the newly founded Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding and is focused on the problem of visual understanding and visual thinking. The authors believe this is the first book to attempt to investigate the complexity of visual thinking problems in the context of building the thinking machine.

This book presents the selected results of research on the further development of the shape understanding system (SUS) described in our previous book titled “Shape Understanding System: the First Steps Toward the Visual Thinking Machines”. This is the second book that presents the results of research in the area of thinking and understanding carried out by authors in the newly founded the Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding. In this book, the new term knowledge implementation is introduced to denote the new method of the meaningful learning in the context of machine understanding. SUS ability to understand is related to the different categories of objects such as the category of visual objects, the category of sensory objects and the category of text objects. In this book, new terms and concepts are introduced in order to describe and explain some issues connected with SUS development. These terms are explained by referring to the content of our books and other our works rather than to existing literature in related areas of research. This book raises many questions that are discussed in the area of cognitive science or philosophy of mind.

An exploration of embodied intelligence and its implications points toward a theory of intelligence in general; with case studies of intelligent systems in ubiquitous computing, business and management, human memory, and robotics. How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment—in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies. This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence—"understanding by building"—to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.

Solid Shape gives engineers and applied scientists access to the extensive mathematical literature on three dimensional shapes. Drawing on the author's deep and personal understanding of three-dimensional space, it adopts an intuitive visual approach designed to develop heuristic tools of real use in applied contexts.Increasing activity in such areas as computer aided design and robotics calls for sophisticated methods to characterize solid objects. A wealth of mathematical research exists that can greatly facilitate this work yet engineers have continued to "reinvent the wheel" as they grapple with problems in three dimensional geometry. Solid Shape bridges the gap that now exists between technical and modern geometry and shape theory or computer vision, offering engineers a new way to develop the intuitive feel for behavior of a system under varying situations without learning the mathematicians' formal proofs. Reliance on descriptive geometry rather than analysis and on representations most easily implemented on microcomputers reinforces this emphasis on transforming the theoretical to the practical.Chapters cover shape and space, Euclidean space, curved submanifolds, curves, local patches, global patches, applications in ecological optics, morphogenesis, shape in flux, and flux models. A final chapter on literature research and an appendix on how to draw and use diagrams invite readers to follow their own pursuits in threedimensional shape.Jan J. Koenderinck is Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University. Solid Shape is included in the Artificial Intelligence series, edited by Patrick Winston, Michael Brady, and Daniel Bobrow

In our everyday encounters, we are continuously challenged by people who think and respond in ways different from ourselves. Each one of us pays attention to different aspects of life, interprets experiences differently, understands certain issues better than others, communicates with differing styles, and uses different criteria for judging and believing others. Parents of a family with several children are usually amazed by the diverse ways in which the children develop. Managers are confounded by the unexpected misunderstandings among themselves and those they manage. Educators find it difficult to account for the broad spectrum of students' responses to a single course of study. And in relationships, one is often perplexed at the ways in which common, everyday words are sometimes interpreted. Those of us who study the ways in which people interact, continue to marvel at the differences people bring to thinking and communicating.For the past 20 years, Dr. Kahn has led a team of scientists in in-depth studies of the different brain processes leading to the different types of information processing in people. This research has developed tools which can measure how people reveal the structure of their thought processes in the flow of their communications. This has enabled the team to develop a model that organizes cognitive structures according to a new paradigm, one that explicitly shows the connections between cognition, input, and output. This paradigm identifies sixteen different ways in which people process information, and describes the underlying brain mechanisms which are responsible. Further, Mind Shapes presents how these differences developed through the stages of human evolution and the way they are expressed in the steps of modern child development.Theory and practicum come together as Mind Shapes links physiology of information processing to behavior, and shows how different people communicate, learn, and make decisions. This model has been successfully applied to education, management, consumer communications, and psychological counseling: dimensions of life where understanding human behavior and motivation are critical to success. Mind Shapes provides its readers with useful tools which were developed as a result of this experience.

This book discusses how and why animals evolved into particular shapes. The book identifies the physical laws which decide over the evolutionary (selective) value of body shape and morphological characters. Comparing the mechanical necessities with morphological details, the author attempts to understand how evolution works, and which sorts of limitations are set by selection. The book explains morphological traits in more biomechanical detail without getting lost in physics, or in methods. Most emphasis is placed on the proximate question, namely the identification of the mechanical stresses which must be sustained by the respective body parts, when they move the body or its parts against resistance. In the first part of the book the focus is on ‘primitive’ animals and later on the emphasis shifts to highly specialized mammals. Readers will learn more about living and fossil animals. A section of the book is dedicated to human evolution but not to produce another evolutionary tree, nor to refine a former one, but to contribute to answering the question: “WHY early humans have developed their particular body shape".