Reasoning With Diagrams Only
George W. Furnas · 2002
Traditional deductive systems work with sentences of symbols. Even in newer systems that also reason from diagrams sentential representations still play a major role. The work here explores deductive systems that use only picture-like representations. Machinery functionally equivalent to variables, quantifiers, substitution, unification, and binding are defined based on a model of deductive chaining as the composition of mappings, where pictures themselves are used to specify the mappings. Appeared in the proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on "Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, " Stanford CA, 3/25/92-3/27/92. Reasoning With Diagrams Only December 30, 1994 1 Abstract Traditional deductive systems work with sentences of symbols. Even in newer systems that also reason from diagrams sentential representations still play a major role. The work here explores deductive systems that use only picture-like representations. Machinery functionally equivalent to variables, quant...