Discovery tools for science apps
Raúl E. Valdés‐Pérez · Communications of the ACM · 1999
The article presents some basic concepts about knowledge discovery, convey the state of the art by reporting on success stories and suggest lessons that are relevant to application areas besides science. Since discovery-oriented workers (discovere) undergo a long apprenticeship to become experts in their field, one might conclude that a discoverer's reasoning process resembles expert reasoning based on recognition. The basic idea of heuristic search is that solving many reasoning tasks can well be viewed as a search within a large combinatorial space. The space is combinatorial because at each choice point there are many choices, and these effects can accrue to create notoriously large spaces. Increases in computer speed are continual and the positive relation between speed and discovery smarts is easy to see in terms of heuristic combinatorial search. By thoughtfully cultivating interdisciplinary collaborations, computer scientists can begin building, and research scientists begin building on, computer programs that are able collaborators in scientific discovery as well as other fields in which the pursuit of new, reliable knowledge is taken seriously.