Session	Cognition
Duration	1 hour
Date/Time	03 Jun 2026 16:00 GMT
	9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT
	5:00pm BST/6:00pm CST
Convener	Ken Baclawski

Ontology Summit 2026 Cognition

• Arun K. Majumdar and John F. Sowa Reasoning Beats Pattern Matching
  • For over 60 years, the best AI reasoning was based on the four step cognitive cycle: abduction, deduction, evaluation, induction, and repeat. Abduction generates hypotheses or educated guesses. Deduction derives implications. Evaluation chooses the best option. Induction combies the result with previous knowledge.
    Many versions of the cognitive cycle have been invented and named. For guiding fighter pilots, John Boyd called it the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. He originally said that each step would be traversed in milliseconds, but he later applied the loop to design and analysis steps that may take minutes, hours, or days. Whatever the time scale, the four steps are fundamental to reasoning in science, business, and life.
    The pattern matching methods of Large Language Models (LLMs) are superb for translating languages, natural or artificial. They are also good for finding and relating patterns in large volumes of data of any kind. That enables them to answer questions by finding information or by applying previous methods to new data. For many problems, pattern matching can discover abductions or educated guesses. But deduction and evaluation cannot be done unless a similar cognitive cycle can be found somewhere on the WWW.
    With the VivoMind system from 2000 to 2010, the authors used conceptual graphs for symbolic reasoning about a wide range of problems. For the new Permion system, they added LLM pattern matching to map conceptual graphs to and from natural language. But pattern matching, by itself, cannot do any reasoning unless it can find and adapt an appropriate cycle on the WWW. It often requires a huge amount of searching even for relatively simple examples.
    In summary, LLMs cannot do reasoning unless and until the system finds a suitable cognitive cycle on the WWW. But the Permion reasoning methods automatically do the four-step cycle. If necessary, they can also do LLM searching, but none is required.

Conference Call Information

• Date: Wednesday, 03 June 2026
• Start Time: 9:00am PDT / 12:00pm EDT / 6:00pm CEST / 5:00pm BST / 1600 UTC
  • ref: World Clock
• Expected Call Duration: 1.5 hour
• Video Conference URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86994661673?pwd=mMUeaWyWhBMSzTw3SgH5GjMv2Qx4rH.1
  • Meeting ID: 869 9466 1673
  • Passcode: 803090
• Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
  • Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/tZIkfu2uqDosHddtIR_XTIoQlXKQbDMLAing/ics?icsToken=DCmtbHKw6UkYvhXO1AAALAAAADorLjwBqUy1j8CrHtKZOzjPeUmMLYQ3XMGusEqr55Acc-ytgOkxl_cBUf2s1j36Jw38ZPHY_ofJ9thYEjAwMDAwMQ&meetingMasterEventId=8dTP3JiuSzqD32pYF8wsXQ

Previous Meetings

	Session
ConferenceCall 2026 04 08	Foundations and Tools
ConferenceCall 2026 04 01	Foundations and Tools
ConferenceCall 2026 03 25	Ontologies and AI
... further results