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The Sciences of the Artificial QUOTES

The Sciences of the Artificial QUOTES

1 " Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

2 " When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work.

Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

3 " Memory has been discussed here as though it consisted mainly of a body of data. But experts possess skills as well as knowledge. They acquire not only the ability to recognize situations or to provide information about them; they also acquire powerful special skills for dealing with situations as they encounter them. Physicians prescribe and operate as well as diagnose.

The boundary between knowledge and skill is subtle. For example, when we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless for most purposes it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

4 " ... although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

5 " It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

6 " No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friederich von Hayek who, in the decades after World War II, was their leading interpreter and defender. His defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment—the computational limits of human beings:31 "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

7 " It is true that humanity is faced with many problems. It always has been but perhaps not always with such keen awareness of them as we have today. We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

8 " An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point—an “interface” in today’s terms—between an “inner” environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an “outer” environment, the surroundings in which it operates. If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

9 " If science is to encompass these objects and phenomena in which human purpose
as well as natural law are embodied, it must have means for relating these two
disparate components. The character of these means and their implications for
certain areas of knowledge economics, psychology, and design in particular are
the central concern of this book. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial

10 " This relation of program to environment opened up an exceedingly important role for computer simulation as a tool for achieving a deeper understanding of human behavior. For if it is the organization of components, and not their physical properties, that largely determines behavior, and if computers are organized somewhat in the image of man, then the computer becomes an obvious device for exploring the consequences of alternative organizational assumptions for human behavior. Psychology could move forward without awaiting the solutions by neurology of the problems of component design—however interesting and significant these components turn out to be. "

― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial