The computer program BACON (1987) of Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon was given the distances of planets from the sun together with their period of revolution and it independently rediscovered Kepler's third law, illustrating how far the positivism at work in "AI" can go. But Kepler's achievement was not determining a - straightforward - relation between two rows of numbers: it was to figure out which numbers should be related, and Kepler's real achievement was actually finding the right question. Incidentally, Kepler stated a fourth law relating planets to perfect polyhedra, and one wonders why this fourth law has not been rediscovered by computer yet...

-- Jean-Yves Girard: Locus Solum