Intuition has been one of the most mysterious forces of nature. Science has little or no understanding of how it works. There are no theories about intuition. But people know it exists. That mysterious understanding, which strikes suddenly.... The following pages guide you through a set of reasonable steps to the startling insight that intuition could be a logical process. That leads to a glimpse of the immense power of your mind....

Intuition could just be an algorithm. Algorithms are seen everywhere. They are just repeatable routines, which yield trusted results. The following pages are about an algorithm, which creates exciting results in Artificial Intelligence. Those results offer you new insights into the secrets of the mind. This algorithm powers a new Expert System.

An Expert System is a computer program, which can diagnose a disease from a list of diseases, by asking questions about the symptoms of the patient. These symptoms often overlap, indicating several diseases. For example, pain, or fever, may be indicated for many illnesses. So, an Expert System seeks to find a single pattern, a disease, among many overlapping patterns.

But, an Expert System faces some awkward problems. There are many possible questions. It has to decide which question to ask first. When there are hundreds of questions in the system, they use heuristics, a statistical analysis of the more likely diseases, to decide priorities. But, then, if the patient has an unusual disease, the Expert System will end up asking far too many questions.

The second problem, in computer terms, is "Uncertainty", a suspicion. Some symptoms may, or may not be present for a disease. This is useless information for an Expert System. A disease can be selected only if the answer is "Yes". While people can use a suspicion to guide them to certainty, computers cannot handle a suspicion. They can only deal with certainty.

"Stupidity" is another problem. The patient answers that he has no pain. But, if a later question implies a painful disease, then, a doctor will call it a "Stupid Question". When many overlapping symptoms are present, Expert Systems, sadly, ask "Stupid Questions."

The biggest problem of all is that each symptom applies to several diseases. After you locate a disease with the first symptom, you discover that it lacks the second presented symptom. This leads to thousands of back and forth searches, as the knowledge base expands in size. Uncontrollable growth of the search path has been a hopeless difficulty.

This explosive growth of the search path made any, practical, large scale pattern recognition completely impossible. The instant recognition of a familiar face by the mind is really unique. How the mind instantly recognizes patterns has always been a mystery.

Some scientists suspected that intuition could hold the key to understanding the mind. But, how? Professor Carver Mead of CalTech believed it would take mankind all the way to 2050 to discover the secret of intuition.

So, how did the mind work? There were a 100 billion neurons in the nervous system. Each cell processed inputs in just a few ten thousandths of a second. How did they interact with each other? Gray's Anatomy, the authoritative book in medicine, suggested that nerve inputs are added up to create a nerve output.

There is much speculation about neural interactions. Scientists speculate that they involve some form of computation, or network logic. According to them, maths or logic is the key to the mind. But, that approach, somehow, does not feel right.

Can maths explain the elegance of the mind? Can a maths processor feel pain, or smile? Can it add pain to love, or subtract music from sadness? Maths fails to reveal the beauty of the mind. With instant pattern recognition impossible and maths too mechanical, the mind remains a mystery. But is swift pattern recognition really impossible?

Next....