A Cognitive Approach to NI and AI Research

Summary form only given. The year of 2006 is the 50^th anniversary of artificial intelligence (AI). The dream of AI is to explore the secrets of the intelligent abilities that natural intelligence (NI) exhibits and transplant these abilities into artificial systems, making machine intelligent. Structuralism, functionalism as well as behaviorism have been the three major approaches to the research in history up to the present time. All the three approaches have made great progress so far. On the other hand, however, all of them are facing critical difficulties and lack of mutual understanding to each other. An attempt was thus made in the paper to propose a different approach to the AI research, the cognitive approach that tries to directly touch in depth the cognitive mechanism of intelligence formation of NI systems. It has been discovered as consequence that the cognitive mechanism of intelligence formation consists of a series of transformations conversing the information to knowledge and further to intelligent strategy and the latter is the embodiment of intelligence in narrower sense and all these transformations are feasible and practical in principle. Moreover, an interesting by-product has also been found that the aforementioned three approaches appear to be harmoniously unified within the framework of the cognitive approach. In other words, the structuralism, functionalism and behaviorism approaches are by no means contradictory to each other from the point of view of cognitive approach. Instead, they constitute into a trinity. These results may be of great significance to both NI and AI research