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The 'what makes science work' is stored in the scientists. They learn by reading the literature, but also by communicating, and by an active process of testing
by rm445 5y ago
The 'what makes science work' is stored in the scientists.
They learn by reading the literature, but also by communicating, and by an active process of testing their own understanding and resolving gaps and inconsistencies. Even when a self-taught genius like Ramanujan comes along, they benefit from being brought into the community.
The question of how one would determine the state of the art in a field has an answer, but at present it would be indistinguishable from training a scientist, rather than running a clever software tool that could synthesize from the literature.
- civilized 5y agoWell that's an interesting idea, isn't it (even if completely impractical today)? Self-training AI robot scientist who not only reads the literature but actually chats with other scientists and tries to do science to improve its understanding. AlphaZero but for science.
- Vetch 5y agoAlphaZero cannot chat and interact outside moving pieces. For science, self-training would be too wasteful, intractable and impossible to boot, given there's no simulator. An AlphaZero for science would instead be like the recent deepmind paper where the pattern matching capabilities and internal features of a neural network were used to navigate some domain's decision space of conjecture formation and testing.