Intuitive physics is cool

We're a group of researchers who want there to be more collaboration and discussion about mental simulation, and we hope this website can be a step toward that goal. At CCN 2022, we hosted a Generative Adversarial Collaboration (GAC) panel where we heard from several active researchers on the topic, and with many of those participants we are now collaborating on a paper to highlight some of the open questions and most promising directions for us to work toward together. In the meantime, we hope the resources on this page will be useful for other researchers who'd like to get started in mental simulation research.

Team

Todd Gureckis

Todd Gureckis

New York University

Todd is a Professor at NYU, where he leads the Computation and Cognition Laboratory.
Josh Tenenbaum

Josh Tenenbaum

MIT

Josh is a Professor at MIT, where he leads the Computational Cognitive Science Laboratory.
Kevin A Smith

Kevin A Smith

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Kevin is a research scientist at MIT, where he's based in the Computational Cognitive Science Laboratory with Joshua Tenenbaum.

Papers

This is a selection of foundational or informative papers that we feel would be useful for someone getting started in the area:

  • Battaglia, P. W., Hamrick, J. B., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2013). Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 18327-18332. [link]

Discussion Videos

These are videos from the discussion at a GAC workshop at CCN 2022:

Experiment Demos

These are demos of some common or easy-to-implement mental simulation paradigms:

OSF Links

These are links to the Open Science Foundation (OSF) project pages for some relevant experiments: