Induction and the discovery of the causes of scurvy: a computational reconstruction

摘要

The work presented here addresses the problem of inductive reasoning in medical discoveries. The discovery of the causes of scurvy is studied and simulated using computational means. An inductive algorithm is successful in simulating some essential steps in the progress of the understanding of the disease and also allows us to simulate the false reasoning of previous centuries through the introduction of some a priori knowledge inherited from pre-clinical medicine. These results confirm the good results obtained by other AI researchers with an inductive approach of discovery, and illustrate the importance of the social and cultural environment on the way the inductive inference is performed and on its outcome.