Intelligent Reasoning - Demystified

Often in the texts of AI, I come across this term called Intelligent Reasoning. Different texts give their own definition of this term. More often than not the questions related to Intelligent Reasoning comes back to me.

• What is Intelligent Reasoning?
• How to define Intelligent Reasoning?
• What is the requirement for a reasoning to qualify as an Intelligent Reasoning?

In quest to find answer to my questions, I first looked at different sources for the definition of meaning hoping that adding intelligence to the process of reasoning is the right answer. But after reading tons of text I understood reasoning as :
A way or process to base our beliefs, actions, philosophies, concepts etc. This is in layman's term what I understood about the intelligent reasoning. There are resources available who had more complex definitions than I can understand.

Now that I understand what the reasoning is, the questions about the Intelligent Reasoning again popped up. I looked back at the questions once again and here is the answer I came up with. This is related in context of Artificial Intelligence and applies to machines only :)

1. What is Intelligent Reasoning? A process to establish a statement, a theory, belief or action in a way as it is performed by human beings.
   
2. How to define Intelligent Reasoning? We have various ways of looking at things, 1) the way they appear or 2) the way they function. While the first approach focuses on Why and What, the second concentrates more on How?. Using these as a mechanism to based a concept could be closely defined as an Intelligent Reasoning Mechanism.
   
3. What is the requirement for a reasoning to qualify as an Intelligent Reasoning? Any reasoning mechanism which is built on the top of existing facts and which co-relates statements, facts to deduce another fact/statement which is not obvious from the fact could be classified as intelligent reasoning. Say for example given the statements like
• A is Brother of B
• C is Sister of B then we conclude that
  
• C is Sister of A

Here in this example above the third fact is derived on the basis of first two facts. The mechanism to reach to the conclusion (3) is classified as intelligent reasoning.

AI being a relatively new field of study, the intelligent reasoning derives its meaning from various other streams like Mathematics, Psychology, Biology, Statistics and Economics who have contributed a lot towards distinguishable notions of what constitutes intelligent reasoning.

The thought of learning in depth of Intelligent Reasoning came to mind while I was working on Ontology server and its architecture for one of the ambitious projects of mine which is receiving great feedbacks from whoever has heard about it. The idea is maturing as I am digging it more and all the bits and pieces like AI, Intelligent Reasoning, Ontology, KR, Semantic Web Services are coming together like different pieces of same puzzle. I will keep putting my ideas and thoughts here as I always do but if you want to be part of this, pls feel free to contact me. I am always reachable for discussion :)

Until Next Time... :)