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Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Processes

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Computational philosophy of science will define twenty-first philosophy of science, and it has already started. This book by Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate and one of the founders of artificial intelligence, describes several computerized discovery systems created under Simon's direction at Carnegie-Melon University in the 1980's.

In his book titled Novum Organon Francis Bacon had expressed the view that with a few easily learned rules or a method it may be possible for anyone undertaking scientific research to be successful. Today Bacon's agenda is called proceduralization for computerized mechanization, and it is appropriate therefore that one of the most extraordinary discovery systems - Pat Langley's - should be named BACON.

The BACON discovery system is actually a set of successive and increasingly sophisticated discovery systems that make quantitative empirical laws and theories. Given sets of observation measurements for two or more variables, BACON searches for functional relations among the variables. The original version was designed and implemented by Pat Langley in 1979 as the thesis for his Ph.D. dissertation at Carnegie-Mellon department under Simon's direction.

System BACON has rediscovered several historically significant empirical laws including Boyle's law of gases, Kepler's third planetary law, Galileo's law of motion of objects on inclined planes, Boyle's ideal gas law, Coulomb's law of electrical current, Ohm's law of electrical circuits, Archimedes law of displacement, Black's law of specific heat, Newton's law of gravitation, the law of conservation of momentum, and the laws describing chemical reactions formulated by Dalton, Gay-Lussac, and Comizzaro.

Other discovery systems also described in this book are: System GLAUBER named after the eighteenth century chemist, Johann Rudolph Glauber, who contributed to the development of the acid-base theory. System STAHL named after the German chemist, Georg Ernst Stahl, who developed the phlogiston theory of combustion. System DALTON named after John Dalton, who developed the atomic theory of matter.

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Thomas J. Hickey

A book which opens a new direction in mankind's outlook towards itself. Talks about how the ultimate quality, namely the creativity, which distinguishes humans from all the animals, is not unique. Should be compulsory reading for all students of computers, if not everybody. Hundred years form now, scientists will call this the first book ever published.