An excursion into social and cultural anthropology by artificial intelligence — An automated discovery system to identify rules of inheritance, succession, marriage, injunction against incest, and exogamy

摘要

This note deals with the problem of discovering rules that govern social interactions and relations in preliteral societies. Two older computer programs are first described that can receive data, possibly incomplete and redundant, representing kinship relations among named individuals. The programs then establish a knowledge base in the form of a directed graph, which the user can query in a variety of ways. Another program, written on the “top” of these (rewritten in LISP), can form concepts of various properties, including kinship relations, of and between the individuals. The concepts are derived from the examples and nonexamples of a certain social pattern, such as inheritance, succession, marriage, class (tribe, moiety, clan, etc.) membership, domination-subordination, incest, and exogamy. The concepts become hypotheses about the rules, which are corroborated, modified, or rejected by further examples and nonexamples.