Diagrammatic reasoning: An artificial intelligence perspective

A common motivation for developing computational frameworks for diagrammatic reasoning is the hope that they might serve as re-configurable tools for studying human problem solving performance. Despite the ongoing debate as to the precise mechanisms by which diagrams, or any other external representation, are used in human problem solving, there is little doubt that diagrammatic representations considerably help humans solve certain classes of problems. In fact, there are a host of applications of diagrams and diagrammatic representations in computing, from data presentation to visual programming languages. In contrast to both the use of diagrams in human problem solving and the ubiquitous use of diagrams in the computing industry, the topic of this review is the use of diagrammatic representations in automated problem solving. We therefore investigate the common, and often implicit, assumption that if diagrams are so useful for human problem solving and are so apparent in human endeavour, then there must be analogous computational devices of similar utility.