Robert M. French

Robert M. French is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is currently at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he worked with Douglas Hofstadter on the Tabletop computational cognitive model. He specializes in cognitive science and has made an extensive study of the process of analogy-making.^[1]

French is the inventor of Tabletop, a computer program that forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects placed on a table.

He has done extensive research in artificial intelligence and written several articles about the Turing test, which was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a means of determining whether an advanced computer can be said to be intelligent. French was for a long time an outspoken critic of the test, which, he suggested, no computer might ever be able to meet. French now believes that the way forward in AI does not lie in an attempt to flawlessly simulate human cognition (i.e., pass a Turing Test) but, rather, in trying to design computers capable of developing their own abilities to understand the world and in interacting with these machines in a meaningful manner.^[2]

He has published work on catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, the Turing test and foundations of cognitive science, the evolution of sex, and categorization and learning in infants, among other topics.