Shadows and headless shadows: a worlds-based, autobiographical approach to reasoning

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Xapagy architecture, a story-based cognitive system that uses autobiographical memory and world-like structures called scenes to perform reasoning through event shadowing and extrapolation.

Contribution

It presents a novel autobiographical, worlds-based approach to reasoning, emphasizing shadowing and extrapolating events within a story-oriented cognitive framework.

Findings

Xapagy effectively models reasoning through event shadowing.

The system predicts future events and infers hidden relations.

World-like scene structures support interpretative flexibility.

Abstract

Many cognitive systems deploy multiple, closed, individually consistent models which can represent interpretations of the present state of the world, moments in the past, possible futures or alternate versions of reality. While they appear under different names, these structures can be grouped under the general term of worlds. The Xapagy architecture is a story-oriented cognitive system which relies exclusively on the autobiographical memory implemented as a raw collection of events organized into world-type structures called {\em scenes}. The system performs reasoning by shadowing current events with events from the autobiography. The shadows are then extrapolated into headless shadows corresponding to predictions, hidden events or inferred relations.