Okay, well, take any nontrivial engineered system and you'll see
complexity being overcome by intuition plus trial and error. Here's a
couple of very good posts by someone who designs microwave electronics
for a living:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.nanotech/browse_thread/thread/ada3a83d1a284969/b713922d343e5371?lnk=st&q=#b713922d343e5371
Again. AIEEEEeeee. No. Engineers do not work just by intuition or intuition
by trial and error. Please read your own link . . . .
He is using a *very* scientific design process. He is starting at the top
level and decomposing the problem. He continued to break it down until he
could use case-based reasoning (experience/rules-of-thunb) to make good
solid predictions with SOLID explainable reasons backing them up. He is
also very clear when he knows something and when he doesn't.
In his own words, "In reality, I think the broad outlines will be the same:
Abstraction and integration, where the devil is in the intelligent
partitioning; design automation for the mind-numbingly tedious or
well-understood details; manual design for the novel or finicky structures;
simulation, to make sure it works. Except, moreso than before."
That is *not* intuition.
= = = = = = = = = = =
Intuition is playing around in parameter space trying to get a feel for the
whole of the space. I did *a lot* of intuition-type science early in my
career when I was doing computer simulations of enzyme kinetics
(particularly since we didn't have the money for enough computer time on the
large computers :-).
Intuition is to Scientists As Design is to Engineers. An engineer may well
not know something but he generally knows when he doesn't know. Most
"scientists" are not nearly this rigorous (although the best ones are) -- so
I live in fear of the computer scientist who is working on AGI (because if
lightning strikes and they get lucky . . . . it still probably won't be
stable or friendly and we can only hope that it has a short, happy,
peaceful, friendly half-life).
The discussion is on CAD software, but the poster goes into a lot of
detail about exactly how complexity is dealt with (essentially a
mixture of avoiding it where possible and otherwise just going ahead
and doing the hard crunching or prototyping work).
I did think that it was a great link though . . . . :-)
-------------------------------------------
agi
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