Abstraction and analogy in AI.

The abilities to form concepts and abstractions, and to make analogies, are key to human intelligence, but AI systems have a long way to go before they can match the abilities of humans in these areas. To develop machines that can abstract and analogize, researchers typically focus on idealized problem domains that are meant to capture the essence of human abstraction abilities without having to deal with the complexity of real-world situations. This commentary describes why solving problems in these domains remains difficult for AI systems, and discusses how AI researches can make progress on imbuing machines with these essential abilities.