This exciting book shows the fertility of a computational approach to scientific discovery. There is nothing mysterious about creativity for its authors. They view discovery as the result of the same general kinds of information processing that researchers in Al and cognitive science have studied in more mundane tasks such, as problem solving. The authors describe a series of computer programs that have been used to "discover" many of the most important scientific laws, including ones associated with the names of Boyle, Ohm, Kepler, Coulomb, Snell, Black and Joule. The BACON programs generate quantitative laws such as ones that describe patterns of chemical reactions.
The heuristics used by these programs are described in detail but without technicalities, so no special background is presupposed. Since the basic Al ideas that underlie the program are lucidly explained, the book provides a splendid entry for a scientist curious about the burgeoning field of ...
