Vector Symbolic Architectures:

A New Building Material for AGI

Simon D. LevyWashington & Lee University

Lexington, Virginia, USA

Ross GaylerVeda Advantage Value Solutions

Melbourne, Australia

The Yin & Yang of Intelligence

The Need for New Representational

Principles• Ecological affordances (Gibson 1979)

• Distributed/Connectionist Representations (PDP 1986)

• Holographic Representations (Gabor 1971; Plate 2003)

• Fractals / Attractors / Dynamical Systems (Tabor 2000; Levy & Pollack 2001)

Fractal RAAM

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

The Appeal of Connectionism(Rumelhart &

McClelland 1986)

WALK

WALKED

ROAR

ROARED

SPEAK

SPOKE

GO

WENT

ignores(mary, john)

Mary won’t give John the time of day.

The Binding Problem

+

? ? ? ?

Solution? Local Representations

Local Representations

The Problem of Two

?

The Problem of Variables

ignores(X, Y)

X won’t give Y the time of day.

Vector Symbolic Architectures

(Plate 1991; Kanerva 1994; Gayler 1998)

Tensor Product Binding

(Smolensky 1990)

Binding

Bundling

+ =

Unbinding (query)

Lossy

Lossy

Cleanup

Hebbian / Hopfield /

Attractor Net

Reduction

Composition / Recursion

Variables

X

john

Current Applications

• Modeling Surface and Structural Properties in Analogy Processing (Eliasmith & Thagard 2001)

• Variables & Quantification / Wason Task (Eliasmith 2005)

• Representing Word Order in a Holographic Lexicon (Jones & Mewhort 2007)

Future Work: Banish the

Homunculus

MSC (Arathorn 2002)

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Future Work: Banish the

Homunculus

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

MSC (Arathorn 2002)