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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Diagnosing strategies for humans?
Message-ID: <15636@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 6-Nov-84 16:33:21 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.15636
Posted: Tue Nov  6 16:33:21 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Nov-84 19:15:27 EST
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> Toby Robison writes:
> 	...while the doctors are actually testing a
> 	sequence of progressively less likely hypotheses.
> 
> I'd claim that's exactly the process that we use when debugging.
> Only when initial hypotheses fail do we bring in the successively
> heavier data-gathering artillery such as tracing.
> 	
> 	This reasoning process is quite unsettling to anyone who
> 	is used to doing decuctive reasoning in his or her work...
> 
> Although scientists might find this so, it shouldn't bother computer
> "scientists" at all.

I don't think it would alarm anyone who does deductive reasoning a lot.
The method described IS deductive reasoning.  As Sherlock Holmes once 
observed: 'when all that is impossible has been removed, whatever remains,
no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'  This doesn't prevent checking
out the most probable (or the most easily tested) first.  It is, in fact,
the most efficient way to approach the problem.

What might be unsettling to some would be the failure of most doctors
to explicitly define the possibilities they are testing.  Most doctors
follow a systematic proceedure for examination and evaluation of patients
in which the various possibilities are examined 'automatically'.  There
is no need to explicitly elaborate a hypothesis until the examination 
proceedure nears its end, when only certain possibilities remain.