AI, crowdsourcing combine to close 'analogy gap'
Specifically, they developed a way for computers to find analogies—comparisons between sometimes disparate methods and problems that highlight underlying similarities. As anyone who enjoyed watching TV's MacGyver disarm a missile with a paperclip or staunch a sulfuric acid leak with a chocolate bar could tell you, analogies can provide critical insights and inspiration for problem solving. Tapping huge databases of inventions could spur innovation, but doing so without the help of analogies is, well, like finding a needle in a haystack. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon and Hebrew University cracked the analogy problem by combining crowdsourcing and a ...