Because this paper is about computer programs thal generate explanations, my debt to Prof. Hempel will be obvious. However, insofar as I wish to use the term'discovery' to cover the activity of finding explanations, I know that Prof. Hempel will not entirely agree with these ideas about mechanizing the activity. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate a very simple idea: that discovery in science and medicine can be profitably viewed as systematic exclusion of hypotheses. That is, hypotheses that explain empirical data can be found systematically by methods that can be implemented in computer programs. The conditions under which this view makes sense are an important part of the elaboration. Two necessary conditions are that the space of relevant hypotheses is definable and that there exist criteria of rejection and acceptability. Because the space of hypotheses is immense for most interesting problems, it is also desirable that there exist criteria for guiding a systematic search.

A. Conduct of Science: Computers and Communications and opportunities for the scientific community to share The claim of science to universal validity is supportable only

The discussion centers on a specific video terminal designed and constructed by the authors. This terminal is based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor and is equipped with software sufficient to emiflate the characteristics of standard video terminals required by eral available screen -oriented text editors in common use at sites throughout the ARPAnet (such as E [Samuel, 1978] and TV-Edit [kanerva, 1975]). Screen-oriented editors2 differ from other editors In their use of high-speed video terminals to display the contents of large sections of a file being edited. As editing operations are performed, the display Is revised to indicate their effects on the file (i.e., editing operates In a What you see is what you get mode). Such editors require ter.linals capable of primitive text-processing operations, such as inserting a character in a line of text by shifting the existing characters. In addition to such capabilities, the terminal is typically expected to support 8-bit transmission (instead of the usual 7 bits plus parity), selectable modes for displaying characters (e.g., normal or inverse video, blinking, or dual intensity), and an 80-character line width.

In the early days of computing, these goals were central to the new discipline called cybernetics [126], [2]. Over the past two decades, progress toward these goals has come from a variety of fields - notably computer science, psychology, adaptive control theory, pattern recognition, and philosophy. Substantial progress has been made in developing techniques for machine learning in highly restricted environments.

Cohen, Design Considerations for a Program to Provide Consultations in Clinical Therapeutics, in Proceedings of San Diego Biomedical Symposium, February 1974.

Cohen, Design Considerations for a Program to Provide Consultations in Clinical Therapeutics, in Proceedings of San Diego Biomedical Symposium, February 1974.

The editors have provided him with special introductory sections as a ing guide to a thorough understand of the reports.

Paper presented at the IPN Symposium 7: Formalized Theories of Thinking and Learning and Their Implications for Science Instruction.

It is no pure coincidence that an organic chemist rather than a computer specialist is writing this foreword.

We present several epistemic views of ideation in scientific discovery that we have investigated: conceptual classification, abductive explanation, conceptual modeling, analogical reasoning, and visual reasoning. We then describe an experiment in computational ideation through model construction, evaluation and revision. We describe an interactive tool called MILA–S that enables construction of conceptual models of ecological phenomena, agent-based simulations of the conceptual model, and revision of the conceptual model based on the results of the simulation.   The key feature of MILA–S is that it automatically generates the simulations from the conceptual model. We report on a pilot study with 50 middle school science students who used MILA–S to discover causal explanations for an ecological phenomenon. Initial results from the study indicate that use of MILA–S had a significant impact both on the process of model construction and the nature of the constructed models.  We posit that MILA–S may enable scientists to construct, evaluate and revise conceptual models of ecological phenomena.