The Karla-the-Hawk analogy is taken from an experiment examining analogical access (Gentner & Landers, 1985) and can be used to test how theories of analogy scale up to larger conceptual structures. In the analogy, a hawk named Karla is attacked by a hunter but comes to befriend the hunter by giving him some of its feathers. In an analogous story, the country of Zerdia is attacked by the country of Gagrach but eventually befriends Gagrach by sharing its computers. The two stories are fairly complex and require a representation with a number of objects and relations.
The Karla-the-Hawk model simulates the process of mapping each source object in the Karla story to each target object in the Gagrach story. The analog representation includes four objects, 18 relations, and 36 roles for each story. Because mapping takes time linear to the number of objects and relations, the model produces the mappings very quickly, demonstrating how path mapping scales nicely to large analogies.