The Competence of Sub-Optimal Theories of STructure Mapping on Hard Analogies
Structure-mapping is a provably NP-Hard problem which is argued to lie at the core of the human metaphoric and analogical reasoning faculties. This NP-Hardness has meant that earlier naïve attempts at optimal solutions to the problem have had to be augmented with sub-optimal heuristics to ensure tractable performance. This paper considers various epistemological grounds for qualifying the competence of such heuristic approaches, and offers a quantitative evaluation of the suboptimal performance of three different models of analogy/metaphor, SME, ACME and Sapper.