  This book develops the conjecture that all kinds of information processing in
computers and in brains may usefully be understood as "information compression
by multiple alignment, unification and search". This "SP theory", which has
been under development since 1987, provides a unified view of such things as
the workings of a universal Turing machine, the nature of 'knowledge', the
interpretation and production of natural language, pattern recognition and
best-match information retrieval, several kinds of probabilistic reasoning,
planning and problem solving, unsupervised learning, and a range of concepts in
mathematics and logic. The theory also provides a basis for the design of an
'SP' computer with several potential advantages compared with traditional
digital computers.
