Melanie Mitchell is an American computer scientist. She is a Professor at theSanta Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas ofanalogical reasoning,complex systems,genetic algorithms andcellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.^[2]

She received her PhD in 1990 from theUniversity of Michigan underDouglas Hofstadter andJohn Holland, for which she developed theCopycat cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception", essentially a book about Copycat. She has also critiquedStephen Wolfram'sA New Kind of Science^[3] and showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to themajority problem for one-dimensional cellular automata. She is the author ofAn Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, a widely known introductory book published byMIT Press in 1996. She is also author ofComplexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the 2010Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, andArtificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Melanie Mitchell was born and raised inLos Angeles, California.^[4] She attendedBrown University inProvidence, Rhode Island, where she studied physics, astronomy and mathematics. Her interest in artificial intelligence was spurred in college when she readDouglas Hofstadter'sGödel, Escher, Bach.

After graduating, she worked as a high school math teacher in New York City. Deciding she "needed to be" in artificial intelligence, Mitchell tracked down Douglas Hofstadter, repeatedly asking to become one of his graduate students. After finding Hofstadter's phone number atMIT, a determined Mitchell made several calls, all of which went unanswered. She was ultimately successful in reaching Hofstadter after calling at 11 p.m., and secured an internship working on the development of Copycat.^[5]

In the fall of 1984, Mitchell followed Hofstadter to theUniversity of Michigan, submitting a "last minute" application to the university's doctoral program.^[6] She earned her Ph.D. in 1990 with the dissertationCopycat: A Computer Model of High-Level Perception and Conceptual Slippage in Analogy-Making.

Mitchell is a Professor at theSanta Fe Institute. Mitchell developed the Complexity Explorer platform for the Santa Fe Institute, which offers online courses. More than 25.000 students took Mitchell's course "Introduction to Complexity".^[7]In 2018, Barbara Grosz, Dawn Song and Melanie Mitchell organised the workshop "On Crashing the Barrier of Meaning in AI".^[8] She features regularly as a guest expert in the Learning Salon, an online interdisciplinary series of meetings about biological and artificial intelligence.^[9]

In 2020, Mitchell received theHerbert A. Simon Award (NECSI).^[10]

While expressing strong support for AI research, Mitchell has expressed concern about AI's vulnerability to hacking as well as its ability to inherit social biases. Onartificial general intelligence, Mitchell said in 2019 that "commonsense knowledge" and "humanlike abilities for abstraction and analogy making" might constitute the final step required to buildsuperintelligent machines, but that current technology was not close to being able to solve this current problem.^[11] Mitchell believes that humanlike visual intelligence would require "general knowledge, abstraction, and language", and hypothesizes that visual understanding may have to be learned as an embodied agent rather than merely viewing pictures.^[12]

• Mitchell, Melanie (1993).Analogy-Making as Perception. MIT Press.ISBN 0-262-13289-3.
• Mitchell, Melanie (1998).An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US: MIT Press.ISBN 0-262-63185-7.
• Mitchell, Melanie (2009).Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-512441-5.
• Mitchell, Melanie (October 15, 2019).Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (First ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.ISBN 978-0374257835.

• Mitchell, M., Holland, J. H., and Forrest, S. (1994)."When will a genetic algorithm outperform hill climbing?".Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.6:51–58.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, andJames P. Crutchfield (1993)."Revisiting the edge of chaos: Evolving cellular automata to perform computations"(PDF).Complex Systems.7:89–130.arXiv:adap-org/9303003.Bibcode:1993adap.org..3003M.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Cowan, George;David Pines; David Elliott Meltzer (1999).Complexity : metaphors, models, and reality. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US:Perseus Books. pp. 731.ISBN 978-0738202327.

• Mitchell's professional homepage at theSanta Fe Institute
• BrainInspired podcast 022 Melanie Mitchell: Complexity, and AI Shortcomings
• Lex Fridman Podcast #61 Melanie Mitchell: Concepts, Analogies, Common Sense & Future of AI
• Machine Learning Street Talk #57 Prof. Melanie Mitchell: Why AI is harder than we think
• Melanie Mitchell publications indexed byGoogle Scholar

• Cellular automatists
• Complex systems scientists
• Living people
• Portland State University faculty
• University of Michigan alumni
• Santa Fe Institute people
• Brown University alumni
• Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel
• Oregon Health & Science University faculty
• Researchers of artificial life

• CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from December 2019
• Articles with hCards
• Year of birth missing (living people)