The Structure-Mapping Engine: A Multidecade Interaction Between Psychology and Artificial Intelligence

This article describes the structure-mapping engine (SME) and its relation to psychological theory and research. SME was created in 1986 as a simulation of structure-mapping theory (SMT) and is still in use, both on its own and as part of larger scale simulations such as CogSketch and Companion that capture analogy’s roles in other cognitive processing. Over the 4 decades since artificial intelligence (AI) first appeared, there has been continual interaction between AI research and human research. We begin by briefly reviewing SMT and the basic construction of SME. After comparing SME with other simulations, we then describe some specific contributions of SME to our understanding of human analogical processing. We close by proposing that these psychological models can become a new technology for AI.