This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI. It’s taking baby steps toward reasoning like humans and might one day take the wheel in self-driving cars.

A few years ago, scientists learned something remarkable about mallard ducklings. If one of the first things the ducklings see after birth is two objects that are similar, the ducklings will later follow new pairs of objects that are similar, too. Hatchlings shown two red spheres at birth will later show a preference for two spheres of the same color, even if they are blue, over two spheres that are each a different color. Somehow, the ducklings pick up and imprint on the idea of similarity, in this case the color of the objects. They can imprint on the notion of dissimilarity, too.

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