Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

In science, having ideas is not the limiting factor. They're just automating the wrong thing. I want to have ideas and ask the machine to test for me, not the other way around.

View on HN

If I understand what's been published about this, it isn't just ideation, but also critiquing and ranking them, to select the few most worth pursuing.

Choosing a hypothesis to test is actually a hard problem, and one that a lot of humans do poorly, with significant impact on their subsequent career. From what I have seen as an outsider to academia, many of the people who choose good hypotheses for their dissertation describe it as having been lucky.

I bet all of these researchers involved had a long list of candidates they'd like to test and have a very good idea what the lowest hanging fruit are, sometimes for more interesting reasons than 'it was used successfully as an inhibitor for X and hasn't been tried yet in this context' — not that that isn't a perfectly good reason. I don't think ideas are the limiting factor. The reason attention was paid to this particular candidate is because google put money down.

The difference is the complexity of ideas. There are straightforward ideas anyone can test and improve, and there are ideas where only PhDs in CERN can test

I don't think that's really right. E.g. what makes finding the Higgs boson difficult is that you need to build a really large collider, not coming up with the idea, which could be done 50 years earlier. Admittedly the Higgs boson is still a "complex idea", but the bottleneck still was the actual testing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com