John Berry <[email protected]> wrote:
> It might have limited application, but mostly, I don't see it, too often > success and failure is just an inch apart. > Yes! That is an important point. Unfortunately, failure is a more likely outcome. There are countless way to make an experiment fail, but only a narrow range of ways to make it work. A minor change to an experiment makes it go off the rails and no one notices. The example I often point to was Shockley's initial refusal to look at zone refining purification. If he had continued to refuse, I doubt Bell Labs could have made practical transistors when they did. Another recent example is the use of computer neural networks in artificial intelligence. Going back to the 1950s people had an intuitive feeling this should work. It resembles actual biological brains, which we know are capable of intelligence. But little progress was made, and the approach was ignored or even denigrated during the "AI winter" eras. Finally, about 10 years ago, the method was revived and greatly improved by using multi-level networks, where one network feed results into another. This, finally, produced outstanding results, unlike anything previously seen. This is the basis for the program that beat one of the world's best go players, and it is the basis for remarkable recent improvements in Google translate. See: https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-more-accurate-fluent-sentences-google-translate/ This progress also came about because computer hardware is so much faster and cheaper. There are many examples of experiments that failed because they done before their time. They worked later on after better instruments were devised. - Jed
