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C00002 00002 First let me mention the inherent interest of getting a handle on scientific
C00005 00003 . SSSEC(Motivation)
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First let me mention the inherent interest of getting a handle on scientific
creativity. How marvelous it would be if we scientists could rely on
automated assistants to carry out the "hack" phases of research, the tiresome
legwork necessary for "secondary" creativity.
AM was attempted to test my personal belief (at the time not strong enough to
be called a hypothesis) that creative discovery in science is largely rule-governed.
For pragmatic and aesthetic reasons, then,
scientific discovery can be -- and ought to
be -- demystified.
Personal belief that discovery can be (ought to be) demystified
Potential for learning, from the system, more about the process
of sci. concept formation, thy. formation, chance discovery
(do experiments on the implementations: eg, vary AM's heurs)
Potential usefulness of the implementations themselves (including AM)
Aids to research; i.e., ultimately: new discoveries.
Potential to education: like Mycin, extract heurs. and teach them
All the usual bad reasons:
"Look ma, no hands" + maternal drives + ego + thesis drives +...
Historical:
Need task with no specific goal, to test BEINGs ideas.
Disenchantment with theorem-provers that plod along, in contrast
to the processes which my model of math demands: intu, need,
aesth., multiple reprs, proposing vs proving, fixed task.
.E
. SSSEC(Motivation)
.QQ
We need a super-mathematics in which the operations are as unknown as
the quantities they operate on, and a super-mathematician, who does
not know what he is doing when he performs these operations.
-- Eddington
.ESS
Although the motivation for carrying out this research of course
preceded the effort, I have delayed until this section a discussion
of why this is worthwhile, why it was attempted.
First let me mention the inherent interest of getting a handle on
scientific creativity. How marvelous it would be if we scientists
could rely on automated assistants to carry out the "hack" phases of
research, the tiresome legwork necessary for "secondary" creativity.
AM was partly a demonstration that some aspects of creative theory
formation could be demystified, could be modelled as simple
rule-governed behavior.
Second, AM itself may grow into something of pragmatic value. Perhaps
it will become a useful tool for mathematicians, for educators, or as
a model for systems in more "practical" fields.
Third, I must stress the potential for learning from AM more about
the processes of concept formation. This was touched on previously,
and several experiments already performed on AM will be detailed
later.
It would be unfair not to mention the usual bad reasons for this
research: the "Look ma, no hands" syndrome, the AI researcher's
classic maternal urges, ego, the usual thesis drives, etc.
Historically, the domain of AM came from a search for a scientific
field whose activities had no specific goal; this was to test out the
BEINGs ideas for a modular representation of knowledge.