sticklen@CPSWH.CPS.MSU.EDU (Jon Sticklen) (05/23/89)
For background, you should be aware that I am a Computer Scientist that does research in Artificial Intelligence. Thus some of the terms that I use may be a little foreign. But let me give this a shot anyway. There was a recent suggestion that the words "first principles" should be dropped from discussions that you all are having - really I assume that means that the term has to be carefully thought out. By extension, the suggestion inferred that although "first principles" may apply to disciplines like physics,that a project to gather biological knowledge and use it as a basis for arguing from "first principles" may be ill-founded. Actually, within the AI community, the notion of "reasoning from first principles" seems to be giving way to "model based reasoning." Model based reasoning is a new sub-field of AI which centers on starting with a model of some physical phenomena, then, by applying reasoning methods (that are currently the object of intense research) deriving how the model will react given boundary conditions. The first problem is to say what is meant by "model." Typically, it is not used in the sense of "model plant" as you all would use it, but rather closer to the sense of the ecologists when they build a container model from which they construct budgets for how one system variable impacts other system variables. Going further, model based reasoning can also mean trying to capture basic understanding of a device by reasoning about how the components of the device operate. This last usage of "model based reasoning" may be quite applicable to some of your problems. For example, one problem you surely hope to impact is the problem of transfer of findings from one researcher to another. As knowledge of some biological device grows, you would like to be able to pass on that incomplete understanding. Model based device reasoning may be useful. My purpose is not to give a tutorial on model based reasoning here, but to suggest to the members of the bio-matrix community that there are other ways of capturing "deep understanding" (to use an AI term) than to argue from first principles. Current model based qualitative reasoning may well be applicable in your project. Jon Sticklen AI/KBS Group - Computer Science Department Michigan State University East Lansing