Learning the Scientific Method From Games 67
Wired is running a story about a research paper out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison which discusses how some games get players to do scientific research without them explicitly realizing it. The paper itself is also available. Quoting:
"... we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in 'social knowledge construction' rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based on reason, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument."
Har har har! (Score:5, Insightful)
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This just in. (Score:1, Funny)
Nerds are smart.
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> "Over half of the posts evidenced systems based on reason, one in ten
> evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative
> epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process
> of evaluation and argument."
Ya, a ranger should optimize for large team-based PvP by going for max ranged damage at the expense of melee and AC, and get the damned purps, got it.
The New Scientific Method (Score:4, Interesting)
These days most scientists have to work hard to keep their funding: publishing, making sure that they don't say things that offend their benefactors, etc.
If you don't believe me, go listen to the CMU podcast about Bill Gates. They suck up to him so badly it is embarrassing just to listen to it. So much for what was once a leading Computer Science department.
As much as we might dislike it, that is the New Scientific Method.
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Your example is misguided. Computer scientists are not actual scientists.
Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:5, Insightful)
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As someone who has spent significant time with the philosophy of science, I should correct a common view:
Mathematics (and by extension, computer science) is a science, it's just not an empirical science, but an analytical one. (Please excuse errors in nomenclature - I did not study philosophy in English.)
The whole thing springs from the fact that science is the pursuit of knowledge, and in some systems (like chemistry) you're building models to understand the unknown, while in others (like logic) you're wo
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Software engineering isn't engineering either, btw.
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Yes it is, you obviously havent attended a software engineering class. Not all engineering is bridges and robots.
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Correct.
He should have said software engineering is not programming .
In software engineering, you're creating the software as a whole product (perhaps an app by itself, perhaps part of a larger product like an embedded radio or microwave.) So you have to know how to gather requirements, create designs, review, build, and test. And for non-trivial products, do this with a dozen or more programmers.
Now software engineering, at least when I was in college 20 years ago, was just a class you took getting your
Software Engineering (Score:2)
With software, management sells the plastic models to the customer as version 1.0.
This is partly because the plastic models cost as much to make as the "real thing".
Most people do not understand that "make all" in a software project is the equivalent of the "build phase" in a civil engineering project. And that's why most people don't know how to manage software projects.
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Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:5, Insightful)
Mathematics isn't a branch of science either. Mathematicians don't practice the "scientific method" as it is generally known, although they do exercise logical reasoning.
Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course I could have used pretty much any case where researchers are funded by people who will turn off the tap if they don't get the results they want. These days that includes many universities.
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Let me take a wild guess... you're not a scientist?
The scientific method is very much alive. I suppose there are some labs that have more private funding than is good for them, but their results will not be accepted by the community unless they stand up under scientific scrutiny.
PS: podcasts, press releases, web pages, etc. are not examples of the end product of the scientific method.
Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:4, Insightful)
Researchers != scientists. Theoretical computer scientists are usually akin to mathematicians; applied computer scientists are more like engineers. Neither group are scientists. Mathematics doesn't have the real-world connection necessary to be science: if you develop an algorithm, it works or not independent of how the world works. Science is about developing theories describing the world, and testing them using experiments about the world. In computer science you can test an algorithm, but that doesn't say anything about the world. It's not the scientific method as that phrase is used.
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Because Information Theory [wikipedia.org] has no practical application to the physics of the Universe [ieee.org], right?
Or not. [umsl.edu]
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No, you're still missing the point. Obviously mathematics is used in science. That doesn't mean mathematics IS science. The practice of science and the scientific method are all oriented toward formulating theories which describe the real world. Mathematics provides tools for formulating theories, but just writing down information-theoretic formulas isn't science. It becomes science when you incorporate them into physical theories, make empirical predictions, test them against observations, and revise
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I'm afraid that it is not I who is "missing the point". Shannon's entropy relationships CANNOT be divorced from the physical workings of our universe. If they were, then they would be capable of producing any number you wanted them to. However, since Shannon's findings agree with how the universe operates, they are by definition scientific discoveries. No more or less than the discovery of absolute zero is a scientific discovery.
If you can find a method by which Shannon's theories may be disproven, then you
Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm afraid that it is not I who is "missing the point". Shannon's entropy relationships CANNOT be divorced from the physical workings of our universe.
Certainly they can. If you define entropy the way Shannon does, you can derive a bunch of inequalities which are mathematically true no matter what laws our universe follows or whether it follows any at all. It's mathematical deduction.
If they were, then they would be capable of producing any number you wanted them to.
No, that's wrong. That's like claiming that in Euclidean geometry, the hypotenuse of a triangle right can have any value independent of the other two sides. The Pythagorean theorem says otherwise, regardless of whether our universe obeys Euclidean geometry or not.
Now, it happens that Euclidean geometry has something to do with the universe we happen to live in. (It doesn't have to, a priori.) So Euclidean geometry turns out to be a useful mathematical tool when constructing physical theories. That doesn't mean that Euclidean geometry is science.
However, since Shannon's findings agree with how the universe operates, they are by definition scientific discoveries.
No: Shannon's theorem's are mathematically true independent of anything in the universe. It happens that the laws of our universe do have something to do with Shannon's theorems, but that isn't any inherent property of the math. It requires actual scientific discoveries to show that, i.e. experimentation and construction of physical theories to describe those experiments.
If you can find a method by which Shannon's theories may be disproven, then you may have a point.
No, the fact that they can't be disproven is why I have a point! Mathematical theorems are true or false independent of anything in the universe. If they're proven mathematically true, they're mathematically true. But scientific theories can in principle be supported or disproven by experiment. No physical experiment will or can disprove Shannon's information inequalities, because they are mathematical truths. At best, an experiment can confirm or disprove whether those inequalities have something to do with our universe. But then it's not Shannon's theory that is the scientific endeavor, it's the experiment.
But as it stands, they are tremendously useful in the proper application of engineering and physics.
You are still confusing "usefulness in science" with "science". Algebra is useful in science, but that doesn't mean that someone who studies algebra is a scientist.
Hawking does not refer to "information" because he believes it to be a cool term to use. He refers to it because it is a solid concept rooted in the nature of the universe.
Arithmetic, differential calculus, and the Pythagorean theorem are all solid concepts which can be used when constructing scientific theories. That still doesn't make mathematicians into scientists.
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In the abstract world of academia, or even just desktop application development, where all you care about is the algorithm, perhaps.
In the real world, you also have constraints like memory and timing. You can, indeed, make theories and perform experiments to optimize this or that algorithm for the actual hardware and typical data sets you will be using. So it would actually be an "applied science" in some cases.
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Algorithm tuning against empirical data is closer to science, but it's usually more like engineering or statistics than science proper. It becomes something more like science if you're formulating and testing theories about, say, people's phone call behavior or other data-generating processes. But that's not what's usually done: more often, it's just tuning the algorithm parameters to fit different classes of data, rather than investigating the social or physical mechanisms that gave rise to that data.
Errr... so is true computer science (Score:2)
Your examples are a bit misleading. Take for example gravity: people have been using it since Ugg dropped a rock on his toe. Gravity has been well characterized and used by engineers since Egyptian times (and before). Netwon helped imnprove the characterization. Yes there are still a bunch of theoretical physicist doing real work experiments to understa
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I know "true computer science" exists. I'm just saying that pure computer science is not science. Mostly, it's mathematics.
I also know that physicists are still studying gravity. That has nothing to do with my point, which is that computer scientists aren't scientists.
Re:The New Scientific Method (Score:4, Interesting)
>The old days Scientific Method of objecttively searching for truth is more or less obsolete.
What old days? When scientists were beholden to Lords and Kings? People who could not only cut off funding with the wave of their hands but people would could have you tried and executed for discovering the "wrong" things?
Or do you mean before that in the ancient world, where great thinkers who spoke out were put to death? Trial of Socrates ring any bells?
You are experiencing whats called idealization of the fictional past. Things are most likely better now (post-enlightenment post-democracy post-civil rights) than ever. I mean, the kids of non-nobles going to university and teaching and publishing disagreeable things?? Scandalous!!
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Sorry, I know too many scientist to buy into your FUD.
I doubt you even know what the scientific method is.
My first reaction... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to the summary was: What? I didn't catch a word of that.
Thankfully, TFA is a bit better:
While I have the highest respect for my esteemed colleagues in Madison, I find myself disagreeing with Steinkuehler's conclusions. These kids are not practicing science, they're practicing being human beings. And as human beings, we find new and inventive ways to meet a challenge whenever one is presented to us.
All one needs to do is look back through history. Aliens didn't build the pyramids; humans did. Humans who were given the seemingly impossible task rose to the challenge and made it happen. The Flavian Amphitheatre (aka the Coliseum) didn't just appear when someone pulled the plug on a drain and the water swirled around. Humans wanted a better place to host their blood sport. So they devised a new method. Trains didn't start moving themselves. Humans had a problem of not enough labor. So they devised a solution.
Which isn't to say that these many engineering feats were devoid of what we today think of as "science". However, it is important to remember that the scientific process (i.e. the thing that separates "science" from simply "effort") is a formalized process that vets the actual facts from the statistical noise. If you are not following the formalized methodology, you are not performing "science".
Which isn't to say that I don't think these kids deserve mad props. They used their brains and were rewarded for it. Which is something to be proud of in a comfortable modern society that makes it all too easy to turn one's brain to the "off" position. :-)
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The Flavian Amphitheatre (aka the Coliseum) didn't just appear when someone pulled the plug on a drain and the water swirled around.
DAMNIT! Now I owe someone 20 bucks!
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These kids are not practicing science, they're practicing being human beings.
I dunno, boss. That "theorycrafting" stuff looks awfully scienciful to me. :)
Check out an example here [elitistjerks.com]. Specifically, the analysis of enhancement shaman [elitistjerks.com] and an attempt to figure out the best weapon/spell combo to maximize damage output.
Basically, what theorycrafting is is people attempting to deduce formulae of game mechanics from experimental observation, and then figure out how they can optimize their character's stats to deliv
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I haven't read TFA so I don't know or not, but for one thing they might not all be 'kids'. A 26 year old guy at work has been an avid WoW fan for years (though has now dropped it because he has a gf). A few of these gamers are bound to have experienced public education and a few science classes. So no wonder they approach things in such an organised manner. I mean, what other way is there to gather practical data than to change things and observe the results? I partly agree with the OP that it is just human
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While you're correct that theorycraft is an inherently scientific endeavour, I too am inclined to disagree with some of the things Steinkuehler says. As indicated by the summary, the paper postulates that people learn scientific method from games, and that games get players to do scientific research. However, the paper's data comes purely from the priest class forum on the official forums. This forum is dedicated to exploring the game mechanics of the priest class, and the only effective way to do that is t
Some of it is science (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, while I'm not on the WoW forums at all, I can tell you that in some games they _are_ doing proper science.
The scientific method isn't about publishing in the sanctified journals and getting grants. It merely says that you have to make falsifiable predictions, and go with the theory that, in this order, (A) better explains the available data, and (B) if they're equal in the former aspect, pick the simplest.
And a lot of reverse engineering a game does just that: it devises experiments, measures some data, and makes falsifiable predictions. And in all cases I've seen, the simplest theory _is_ the one picked.
One example was COH before the game devs decided to actually show you the numbers. People did devise experiments to basically measure a lot of data, and solved the equations to come to the endurance (mana) costs of powers. And made falsifiable predictions.
E.g., one such experiment was to figure out a mix of powers which drains your endurance to zero, measure over how much time. Given enough such equations (at least one per variable), you can calculate the costs of each. And you can make the predictions for another set of powers. Or in reverse, how long it takes to recharge X points of mana, if you have powers A, B and C turned on. And again, the experiments were done, and available to everyone, to try to falsify the theory based on those predictions.
The theory also passed Occam's Razor with flying colours, in that it assumed the minimum possible: that each power only has a given cost per second, without any other interdependencies. E.g., if power A costs 0.21 endurance/sec, it always does so, regardless of whether you have powers B and C also active, and regardless of who you are or what you're doing. And again, even that assumption was falsifiable and supported by experimental data.
Now someone may argue that reverse-engineering a game is hardly a _serious_ scientific domain, or that it doesn't exactly benefit humanity in the same way as the LHC's reverse-engineering hadrons does. Fairy 'nuff. But nevertheless the scientific method was applied. Quite literally.
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Scientific progression is not always this ultra-formalized process you speak of; it usually (almost always, and certainly it is vetted after the initial discovery) is today, but especially in the past, our current standards of statistics and peer review did not exist. That doesn't mean that the earliest days of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the work of Newton didn't constitute an advancement of science. Science is not some monolithic process you must live and die by...that's only our curr
Portal (Score:1)
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In other words, yes -- they could have their cake and eat it too! (sorry, couldn't resist.)
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Well... Maybe it doesn't break conservation of energy. Who knows how good a battery Aperture Science put into that gun? Judging by other Aperture Science ventures (see the wikipedia article, if that info is still there), it wouldn't surprise me if they found a clean, virtually infinite energy source and put it to an obscure use (like running a human rat through a maze) without considering the more important things it could be doing.
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Didn't Tony Stark just solve this problem with a soldering gun and some paladium recently?
Lesson to learn: Much of human technical progress is tied to new materials, i.e. materials science. Wood, stone, bronze, iron, steel, stainless steel, titanium, kevlar, nanotubes in a polycarbon resin compound, blah blah blah.
Currently we're paused waiting for that magnificent battery/power source that's relatively light and offers a lot of power. And is cheap and can be refilled/recharged cheaply.
I think they are missing something. (Score:5, Insightful)
With all the games I've ever played(not all of them certainly; but a fair few), I've never escaped the sense that I'm attacking a constructed puzzle, that was built by somebody with the explicit purpose of being a game. Games just reek of design. Some are better than others; but all of them are, to a noticable extent, a process of reverse engineering somebody's carefully designed puzzle.
Very few games even rise to the level of having a degree of unintended emergent behavior, rather than strictly scripted design, and what does emerge frequently derives from the humans in a multiplayer game, not the game itself. Most games are also orders of magnitude less complex than even fairly simple natural systems. Find an object in a game? It almost definitely has a purpose.
I agree that there is an overlap between the skills needed to dissect a game's workings, and the skills needed to study the world; but the epistemology of dissecting a game and the epistemology of studying the world seem significantly distinct.
Since games are probably more relevant than my amateur whinings about epistemology, does anybody have examples of games that seem particularly "natural", not in the sense of visually appealing or having accurate physics(though those are nice); but in the sense of feeling as though they hadn't been engineered in every detail?
It certainly isn't perfect; but I'd say Dwarf Fortress [bay12games.com] had some of that feel for me.
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Discworld MUD, because so much of its content is engineered by *players*, rather than DMs, seems to be pretty damned natural. One gets a sense of amazing engineering, but it's also as if the whole world has escaped just a little from its designers, and become something a bit... more.
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How about the Bridge games by Chronic Logic. Though some of the funniest bridges are exploits of the engine...
As someone who works on engineering simulations, I know exactly what you mean. Most games design is balanced so as to not be too difficult both for the players and for the programmers implementing the game. The real-world is notably more complex and open ended.
That said, I think one can certainly hone smaller scale critical thinking skills with games.
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You mean that there aren't any watches in the world that were placed there by God? ... Okay okay, to be serious for a moment, consider this: does it matter whether the world or the game has been designed or not, if the individual game player has limited knowledge of the (game) world anyway?
I understand what you're saying about games having that feeling of being engineered, but perhaps it doesn't necessarily matter if the person experiencing the game for the first time is absolutely clueless about what objec
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I think Commandos have a very good take at that, because although it is definitely a puzzle, and the designer must have thought in a solution for every stage, you don't have to his solution. You just need to find a way to kill Person A without sounding any alarms. Actually, Lemmings already did that, some decades ago.
lolz (Score:2)
The WoW forum scientific method. (Score:3, Funny)
The WoW forum scientific method [wikipedia.org]
Define the question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form hypothesis
Perform experiment and collect dat.... Post to the forum with junk data (personal anecdotes)
Analyze dat.... get flamed by trolls incessantly to 5 pages
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothe.... Blizzard buffs rogues (no matter what the subject was).
Publish resu.... You have wasted your time, just like when you play the game.
Rinse and repeat.
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P.S. WHY doesn't slashdot support the strike tag?
Two reasons. First, it's deprecated. Second, because they probably have a whitelist filter for tags so that only their preapproved ones get through. That would lend itself nicely to not have the lesser used deprecated tags like strike and blink.
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It's transparently obvious that the strike tag is growing in popularity, as it is being added to more and more BBS-type systems online. So it isn't going anywhere.
No, the real reason is some BBSs dislike sarcasm and the like because it pisses off the targets. So we end up on Slashdot using strikethru^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H control-H's, a fine, time-honored tradition that only the kind of people who post on Slashdot would understand, anyway.
Myth Busters scientific method game (Score:3, Insightful)
The new Mythbusters scientific method:
1. Find urban legend
2. Wonder out loud if urban legend is true
3. Dream up inadequate set of tests. Bonus points if the tests only work for a specific subset of what you're trying to proove.
4. Get special effects team to engineer something wacky to apply tests in 3.
5. Blow something up
6. Comment on how awesome it is and congratulate self on coolness
7. Come up with off hand summary of whether myth is busted. Bonus points for ignoring or manipulating facts to suit.
8. Profit!!!
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--
Blackshot [blackshotfps.com]
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Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
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IF you present yourself as doing something, but you don't cover all your bases you are deceiving the viewers and cause misunderstanding about what it is you are claiming to represent.
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Don't knock 'em. They may not be covering all the bases, but they're out there in the real world blowing crap up and measuring the shrapnel.
The "getting out there and getting your hands dirty" part of science is vastly underrated. The best way to figure out what will really happen is to go on out there and do it.
Oh I'll knock 'em alright. You can't justify throwing out proper use of the scientific method, complete with controls, just because you're getting your hands dirty and entertaining people. What they
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What they are doing is popularizing the idea of experimentation, and they're doing a very good job of that. The fact that their experiments lack scientific rigor is rather beside the point, particularly since that sort of rigor would make for spectacularl
Not news (Score:2, Interesting)
In any game like this you'll always find a minority that will do all the theory crafting in order to maximize some aspect of the game. For World of Warcraft people usually refer to the elitist-jerks forums that specializes in this. However I'd say far less than 1% really ever does any concrete critical thinking about game aspects in order to improve play.
I myself have actually gone and done the math on some things, and I actually got into a sort of "discussion" with another person over it. The conclusion
Youtube (Score:1, Funny)
"... we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in 'social knowledge construction' rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based on reason, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and a