19 PROMIS: Experiments in Machine Learning and Protein Folding R. D. King t

Perhaps the most promising and yet most difficult application of machine learning is in the area of scientific discovery: 'the most technically gripping challenge,... will be how to spread the computer wave from the front end of the scientific process, the telescopes, microscopes,... spark chambers, and the like, back to recognition and reasoning processes by which the chaos of data is finally consolidated into orderly discovery' (Michie 1982). For scientific discovery, machine learning is viewed as a tool to aid working scientists in forming theories from data.