Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 12:59:32 11/08/00
Go up one level in this thread
On November 08, 2000 at 11:02:54, Joe Besogn wrote: > > >Kuhn concluded early that the conventional textbooks on the history of science >were simply wrong, not so much about facts as about processes and sequences. No >science primarily develops in steady, small increments — tiny accruals of fact. >Science develops in revolutionary spasms, with periods of consolidation between. >Both before and after revolutionary changes, any given discipline has >overarching theories, some models, favorite metaphors, systems of symbolization. >These ways of thinking — Kuhn called them together paradigms — not only define >the discipline but can be used to explain most of the phenomena in which the >discipline is interested, as did Ptolemaic astronomy or the phlogiston theory. > >Most "normal science" is not engaged in radical innovations, lonely and heroic >explorations of the unknown. Most normal scientists work with the puzzles for >which the contemporary paradigm is applicable. Those puzzles for which the >paradigm does not apply are typically ignored or even denied to exist. But >sometimes these anomalies of explanation cannot be denied, either for pressing >general reasons (in which case several people are apt to create a new paradigm >almost simultaneously) or because some atypical scientist finds the climate >right for the acceptance of his ideas. Then a new paradigm is created, a new >system of thought, which explains more phenomena more parsimoniously and >elegantly. Often, Kuhn tells us, there ensues a battle between the >conservatives, the adherents to the old paradigm, and devotees of the new ways >of thinking. When one side or the other wins, they can return to their more >peaceful puzzle laboratories. > >A new paradigm amounts to seeing the theoretical structure of a scientific >discipline in some new and useful way. The effect, if innovation takes hold, is >revolutionary. If the revolution is a large one, the effector or effectors are >often dubbed geniuses, and previous geniuses become denigrated. Someone else claims that we can't talk about paradigm shifts in our field, essentially because it's not an important field. I don't know a lot about paradigms, and I haven't read Kuhn's book. In college, my libertarian roommate Jerry read it, and that was good enough for me. That guy preferred Art Garfunkel to Paul Simon, avoid avoid avoid. New paradigms would tend to get adopted quickly in computer chess, since it is usually easy to provide evidence that something works. Particularly strong evidence would be a program that wins. There have been a couple of times where people jumped on a specific bandwagon. People didn't know that full-wdith search could make a strong program until Slate and Atkins did it, and after that point it became typical to write full-width programs. There was another shift when Donninger published the null-move article. Prior to that, null move was underappreciated, and after that it became the norm. Other programs have had success with techniques that weren't thought to be useful, for instance self-teaching. This hasn't started a wave of self-learning programs yet, but there have been some interesting articles and some interesting attempts. We will probably see more interest in speculative evaluation since Christophe's speculative program has been a success. All the programs that I know of now are built on a brute-force framework, with selective extension and selective pruning. If anyone can make a strong program that doesn't use these mechanisms, that will cause the most major shift we've seen so far. bruce
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