The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-Making*

concept (as opposed to the instance thereof found inside the string xyz). Many people, eager to construct a successor to Platonic z, invoke the commonplace notion of circularity, thus conceiving of a as the successor of z, much as January can be considered the successor of December, the digit Ό' the successor of the digit '9', an ace the successor of a king, or, in music, the note A the successor of the noteG. Invoking circularity in this way to deal with Problem 6 is a small type of creative leap, and not to be looked down upon. However, the general notion of circularity is not available to the program, as it is to people, for borrowing and insertion into the alphabet world. In fact, for important reasons, 5 The current version of Copycat is not able to create two simultaneous bonds between two given objects (e.g., both the alphabetical and numerical successorship bonds between г and ss), so the program is at present unable to get what many people consider to be the best answer—namely,