Several versions of the thesis appear in the literature, some stronger, some weaker. It can be broken down into two parts: first, that a problem that cannot be solved through any theoretical means of computatinn that is, a Turing machine, cannot be solved by human thought either; second, that if humans can solve a problem or engage in some intelligent activity, then machines can ultimately be constructed to perform in the same way.

The term "emergence" is used primarily in three different wavs: (1) something surprising and not fully understood, (2) a property of a System not contained in any one of its parts, and (3) behavior that is not preprogrammed that arises from agent-environment interaction.

The term emergent is used mainly in three different ways. First, it is often applied to situations, agent behaviors, that are surprising and not fully understood. Second, it refers to a property of a System that is not contained in any one of its parts. This is the typical usage in the field of artificial life, dynamical Systems, and neural networks for phenomena of self-organization. Third, it concerns behavior resulting from the agent-environment interaction whenever the behavior is not preprogrammed.

The frame problem concerns how models of parts of the real world can be kept in tune with the real world as it is changing. It is especially hard to determine which changes in the world are relevant to a given Situation without having to test all possible changes. The frame problem has two aspects, a prediction problem and a qualification problem.

Intelligence is too complex a notion to be captured by a simple definition. What people in general and even scientists mean by the term varies greatly, and there is little hope that there will ever be agreement. The key aspect, implicitly or explicitly present in many conceptions of intelligence, is generation of behavioral diversity while complying with the rules. This idea is independent of any notion of levels of intelligence. It applies to abstract thinking just as much as to an animal avoiding a predator. An organism that always displays the same behavior is not intelligent.

By cognitive science we mean the interdisciplinary investigation of intelligence, or more generally, the mind.

The input layer is fully connected to the map layer. In the map layer, lateral connections are excitatory for close neighbors, inhibitory for those further away, and neutral for the ones still further out.

A domain ontology is a systematic account - a list - of all the basic concepts (i.e., the objects, relations, and operations) that are needed in a particular domain. The primitives have to be defined for any system whatsoever, be it a database system, a communication system, an expert system, a system for understanding natural language, or a robot.

Self-sufficiency means an agent's ability to sustain itself over extended periods of time.

The symbol-grounding problem concerns how symbols relate to the real world. The symbol-grounding problem becomes obvious if the human observer is taken out of the loop and the System must interact on ist own with the environment. It is a characteristic of symbolic approaches; nonsymbolic approaches do not have a symbol-grounding problem.