"Pulling it All Together" via Psychometric AI

Rather long ago, Newell (1973) wrote a prophetic paper that could serve as a rallying cry for this 2004 symposium: “You Can’t Play 20 Questions with Nature and Win.” A number of those concerned with integrated cognition know of this paper, which helped catalyze both modern-day computational cognitive modeling through cognitive architectures (like ACT-R, Soar, Polyscheme, CLARION, etc.), and AI’s attempt to build a chess-playing machine better at the game than any human. However, not many know that in this paper Newell suggested a third avenue for achieving integration, one closely aligned with psychometrics. In the early days of AI, at least one thinker started down this road for a time (Evans 1968), but now the approach is long dead and all but forgotten. We recommend resurrecting this approach, in the form of what we call Psychometric AI , or just PAI (pronounced to rhyme with “π”). We briefly describe and defend PAI herein. We include some coverage of PERI, a robot in our lab who exemplifies PAI and integrated (artificial) cognition. We also explain how it is that we can strive for integration via the near-exclusive use of mechanized logic, under the umbrella of Newell’s third route.