Dylan Holmes

I am interested in using computational models to help us understand how humans think.

I'm part of the Genesis story-understanding group in CSAIL and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

Computing moral hypotheticals (2021). My PhD dissertation describing the system I built to reason about moral hypotheticals as we humans do, by imagining what might have happened instead and by comparing situations qualitatively.

Story-enabled hypothetical reasoning (2017). My S.M. Thesis on how much of human intelligence depends upon understanding what could have otherwise happened, and how we can model this intelligence using a story-based framework.

Projects

I've written up several of my projects on my personal site, logical.ai.

Teaching

Here are my teaching materials for 6.034: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.

AI demonstrations

• Deductive rule-based systems
• Nearest neighbors classification
• Alpha-beta pruning
• Identification trees. (While not a demonstration per se, the Pokémon guessing game is built upon them.)
• Step-by-step constraint satisfaction solver [csp.py]



Additional notes

• What's up with constraints in line drawings?
• The four flavors of constraint propagation (pdf)
• Practice problems for constraint propagation
• A constraint satisfaction counterexample. Even after preliminary domain reduction, all four solution strategies must backtrack to find the solution.
• Solving SVM quiz problems
• Intuition, solutions, and edge cases for SVMs (courtesy of Robert McIntyre)
• My proof that Robert's convex hull method always works.
• Jessica's d-separation handout (courtesy of Jessica Noss)

Marvin Minsky  

• Marvin Minsky's Homepage and my local mirror.
• Society of Mind, an online version of his book Society of Mind.
• The Golden Gallery Project has recreated three classic AI theses as free software in modern programming languages.
• AI Lab archives, a trove of publications from the AI lab.
• Music, Mind, and Meaning, an exploration of Marvin's musical life in the context of his paper, Music, Mind, and Meaning.
• Listen to Marvin improvising on the piano. (From the online edition of Music, Mind, and Meaning)
  
• The limitations of using languages for description, rare transcript of a 1970 lecture.

Contact

Feel free to contact me! You can e-mail me at dxh@mit.edu.