| This book presents the results of the research in one of the most complex and difficult areas of research such as research in the areas of thinking and understanding. This research that is carried out in the newly founded Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding www.qjfpl.org/QJRIU/ Eng/Eng–QJRIU–PO–O.htm is focused on research on the problem of visual understanding and visual thinking. Visual understanding is part of the general understanding problem and it is not possible to carry out the research in visual understanding without reference to the nonvisual understanding problems. Understanding appears as the result of the thinking processes, and doing research in the area of understanding there is a need to include thinking process as one of the research problems that should be solved in the context of understanding investigations. According to our knowledge, this book is the first attempt to investigate the complexity of the visual thinking problems in the context of building the thinking machine. The aim of our research is to build the machine that can have capabilities to solve visual problems during thinking process. We are aware how complex this problem is and we are aware that the results of our research are only the first steps in building the thinking machine being able to solve complex visual problems. However, we believe that the results of our research will pave the way into the new way of thinking about designing the thinking machines and, especially, will supply the new scientific arguments about our human nature.
Until now, the problem of understanding and thinking was the topic of research in the area of philosophy, psychology, or cognitive science. Philosophical investigations of many thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, or contemporary thinkers contributed into progress of understanding and thinking processes. Although there are some research on this topic in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers in AI do not pay sufficient attention into understanding/thinking problems. It was probably for that reason that they tried to tailor the problem of what they called “artificial intelligence” to the abilities of the existing computing machines. |