Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!paul.rutgers.edu!hundt From: hundt@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas M. Hundt) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: 2 talks by Herb Simon at Rutgers Thursday Feb. 23 Message-ID: Date: 7 Mar 89 21:10:03 GMT References: <2493@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <18094@gatech.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 47 ---------- >I am by no means up-to-date on AI, but I don't believe this. .... > .... What have these things *actually achieved*? BACON, GLAUBER, DALTON and STAHL are programs designed not to discover new things but rather to show that it is possible to account for scientific discovery computationally without having to make appeal to some mysterious "intuition," especially when run cooperatively. See the book _Scientific Discovery_ by Langley, Simon and Bradshaw, 1987. These programs are tools for studying the process of discovery more than programs designed to make discoveries which are completely new to their domains. ---------- Right, Simon's theme in his second talk was basically that it doesn't take genius to be a "genius". Or more precisely, any intelligent person following a certain logical series of steps may arrive at an important discovery, given the underlying information and a given stimulus. F'r instance, there was Fleming and his mold that killed bacteria. Now, here was a guy who knew a lot about bacteria, and knew what to expect. So, he found that on a Petri dish he didn't bother to clean ("sometimes you find interesting things that way") a mold was killing some bacteria. This got his attention, because it did not fit in with his expectations. He asked questions: is it a particular type of bacteria? What about the mold? etc. Logical questions. Generalize the occurrance, use experiments to find the answers. Draw new conclusions. Design new experiments. Etc. Simon's example programs showed that is possible to mechanize these steps, at least to some degree. . . . He also mentioned that to become a World Class Scholar (a big term these days at Rutgers, where they're always hiring one or another; we mis-pronounce the abbreviation "wixel"), one needs to know a *lot* about one's field, 50000 or so facts, where a "fact" is about equivalent to knowledge about an English word. Most people have vocabularies in the range of 50000 words, to give an idea. The other thing you need is 10 years intense use of that knowledge, in one's field of expertise. -- w ["] | Thomas M. Hundt :: hundt@occlusal.rutgers.edu | |__'_ | Gradual Student :: Electrical & Computer Eng. | H \/| Rutgers University :: 201/932-5843 | X | 272 Hamilton St. #96 :: 201/247-6723 | _/ \_ | New Brunswick, NJ 08901 "Limit guns not speed" |