Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Understanding Gothic Cathedrals

摘要

This paper introduces a work in progress on a new research topic for artificial intelligence. It presents the first stages of research that investigates the capacities of AI to understand the architectural rules that define historic architecture: specifically those of Gothic cathedrals. Gothic architecture has its own logic. It follows rules that are defined by physical and structural constraints as well as by the style of the architecture. This project will analyze specialized descriptions of Gothic architecture and translate them into computer code. On the long run this will result in an intelligent computational model, a program that can understand the structure of a Gothic cathedral and reason about its architecture. This paper introduces the background of this project, sketches a small knowledge base illustrating the approach, and describes the potential impact of this type of research on the study of historic architecture.