24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 Science Generators

Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the strategy of Looking for Generators. We confront many problems. We can try to solve them one by one. But alternatively, we can try to create a generator that produces solutio...
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
Folksonomies: science hypotheses
  1  notes

Nick Bostrom on the possibility of looking for scientific concept generators, similar to the way Conway's Game of Life is a pattern generator, rather than looking for random scientific problems to solve.