The Sciences of the Artificial

The adaptiveness of the human organism, the facility with which it acquires new representations and strategies and becomes adept in dealing with highly specialized environments, makes it an elusive and fascinating target of our scientific inquiries—and the very prototype of the artificial.

A computer program, UNDERSTAND, simulates the processes that people use to generate an internal representation of (to understand) a problem like A Tea Ceremony.78

What is striking about these documents is their practical sense and the awareness they exude of the limits of foresight about large human affairs.

The heart of the data problem for design is not forecasting but constructing alternative scenarios for the future and analyzing their sensitivity to errors in the theory and data.

Social planning without fixed goals has much in common with the processes of biological evolution.

Numbers are not the name of this game but rather representational structures that permit functional reasoning, however qualitative it may be.

If asked to read a string of digits or letters and simply to repeat them back, a subject can generally perform correctly on strings up to seven or even ten items in length. If almost any other task, however simple, is interposed between the subject’s hearing the items and repeating them, the number retained drops to two.

This view can be extended to all of problem solving—solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories.