“Qualitative reasoning, getting computers to reason qualitatively about the real world, is one of the most challenging open problems in AI. This important book convincingly argues that qualitative reasoning provides an important link between perception and cognition. It is an immensely valuable resource for AI researchers and cognitive scientists alike."
Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at University of New South Wales, Australia
"An accessible and comprehensive treatise on all aspects of qualitative representations, reasoning, and learning, and their relation to the quantitative world. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the power and usefulness of symbolic, relational representations for both AI and cognitive science. Notable for its timeliness as these fields struggle to develop theories and implementations that bridge the burst of results from statistical machine learning with the power and rich expressiveness of qualitative representations.”
John E. Laird, John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, University of Michigan
“This book presents a broad and deep exposition of the field of qualitative reasoning. It's a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the link between perception, cognition, and reasoning. The book beautifully brings together the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and psychology, in a way that only Ken Forbus can achieve.”
Barry O'Sullivan, Professor of Constraint Programming, Department of Computer Science, and Director, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Cork, Ireland
“It is three and a half decades since the landmark special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence on qualitative reasoning, so it is certainly time to review what progress has been made since those auspicious beginnings. In this book, Ken Forbus reviews the origins of the field of qualitative reasoning and charts the progress since then, concentrating on his own work, but also including key related research of others. A constant thread is the relevance of qualitative reasoning to cognitive science, and how it has been influenced by cognitive science, for example in the chapters on analogical reasoning. I particularly welcome the attention given to qualitative spatial reasoning. For anyone interested in the field of qualitative reasoning, its relationship to cognitive science, sketch understanding, analogy, common sense, and expert reasoning, this book provides an excellent introduction, and many pointers to other work in the literature to explore.”
Anthony G. Cohn, Professor of Automated Reasoning, School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK
