Although I have continually referred to the creative understanding process, it is important to recall that there is only a single understanding process in my research: a creative process. It would be equally correct to speak of the ``understanding process'' but I wish to emphasize the creative aspects of it.
The power of my approach comes from utilizing four tasks, each of which is suited for providing an understanding of a different kind of novel concept, from concepts which are ``simply'' novel in an instantiation sense to those which are novel in a revolutionary way. With the integration of these four tasks in an ``understanding cycle'' which can iterate as many times as necessary, a large number of novel concepts can be understood by appealing to this theory. In addition, rather than imposing arbitrary bounds on the process, the bounding which is in-place is motivated by the commitments of the theory as a whole, thereby leading to a more principled control of the overall technique.
As I have said, the approach I have been taking relies on the understanding process existing within the reading behavior. This is the case in my own work; future work will need to focus on the applicability of the technique in non-reading domains. But, the ISAAC model is a reading system and is, therefore, able to take full advantage of that fact in its implementation of the process of creative understanding. The next two chapters will demonstrate this as I present first the model itself and then discuss the evaluation I performed on it to test its competence.