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Re:Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning by TezlaOil on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:42AM (#18383132)
The computer program BACON (1987) of Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon was given the distances of planets from the sun together with their period of revolution and it independently rediscovered Kepler's third law, illustrating how far the positivism at work in "AI" can go. But Kepler's achievement was not determining a - straightforward - relation between two rows of numbers: it was to figure out which numbers should be related, and Kepler's real achievement was actually finding the right question. Incidentally, Kepler stated a fourth law relating planets to perfect polyhedra, and one wonders why this fourth law has not been rediscovered by computer yet...

-- Jean-Yves Girard: Locus Solum

Re:Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning by jackpark on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:56PM (#18384356)
Bacon was the dissertation project of Pat Langley under Herbert Simon. It was one of several dissertations exploring rational reconstruction of previous discoveries. https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/81-1/Papers/025.pdf
Re:Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning by max_likelihood on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:12AM (#18383435)
Perhaps BACON would have discovered Kepler's 4th law if the AI was programmed by mystics? :)