Self-evaluating , Collaborative Labs for Formal Sciences

The Scientific Method is widely used but there is no generic cyberinfrastructure that works across scientific domains and that enforces the rules of a refutation-based scientific community. In the Scientific Method one formulates claims in a form that could conceivably be falsified by a test using a protocol. The refutation protocol is part of the claim which makes it explicit when refutation is successful. We propose to provide a generic cyberinfrastructure for the Scientific Method which can be customized for numerous scientific domains. The benefits are (1) a uniform interface across scientific domains (2) faster and targeted scientific progress because claims are exposed to more refutation attempts. They are in refutable form on the web. (3) the cyberinfrastructure adapts to the skill level of the scholars (players). While Google’s mission is to ”organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” our mission is ”to implement cyberinfrastructure to develop and support constructive, domain-specific knowledge. ” RESEARCH GOALS The Scientific Method has not yet been implemented as a generic software tool that can be customized for various domains to develop new knowledge. We present our design of such a generic tool and propose how to improve the current implementation. Applications range from research to teaching (MOOC) courses in STEM areas. In this proposal we focus on formal sciences although the idea applies to both formal sciences and other sciences. Unlike other sciences, the formal sciences are not concerned with the validity of claims based on observations in the real world, but instead with the properties of formal systems based on definitions and rules. Examples of formal sciences are: logic, mathematics, theoretical computer science, information theory, systems theory, decision theory, statistics. Submitted for review to Google. Previous work supported by GMO and Novartis. Our goal is to develop a cyberinfrastructure to define labs that are used to develop or disseminate constructive, domainspecific knowledge. Think of a lab as a virtual world where scholars make claims and other scholars refute, strengthen or agree with those claims. The labs are inhabited either by human scholars or by avatars. In 3 pages we cannot completely describe the Scientific Community Game. Therefore we have written a separate 8 page description of the game [8]. We have developed the Scientific Community Game (SCG) over the last few years as a model for the Scientific Method. SCG organizes the development of true and optimal claims about domain-specific, constructive knowledge. While SCG itself is a formal system with formal properties which is the result of a mechanism design problem, it has a social engineering motivation. Problem Statement: Lab Design Defining good labs is a challenging task. Lab design is like program design but the program is executed by machines and people. A lab implementation consists of the implementation of a few method signatures (such as valid, quality, belongsTo, etc.) which define a sociotechnical system in which scholars solve the problem posed by the lab design. In modern terminology, lab design is a part of programming the human brain [3]. We propose to solve the following problems related to lab design. (1) dynamic checking of lab designs. (2) dividing scholars into pairs to optimize the innovation/teaching effect. (3) distributing credit for partial results. (4) claim reductions. This new software will be integrated with our current Scientific Community Game (SCG) software [1]. If time permits, we would like to port the system to the cloud to make it flexible with respect to resource demands. DESCRIPTION OF WORK We refer to the numerated list from above. 1. We develop a dynamic checking tool that gives useful feedback on the quality of a lab before it is given to human scholars or avatars. The idea behind the dynamic checking tool is that the lab definition defines a baby avatar that properly follows the