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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

In other words, having that good intuition heuristic matters less when you can brute-search a wider range of options. Of course, no one likes being told that idiotically testing many many options is better than "intelligence". I suspect we programmers are going to be OK with this idea, until we're replaced too. :-)

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There will still be cases where this isn't possible. In the chemistry case, let's say you look at the structure of your starting material and your product and notice that it has a functional group that your catalyst can be tethered to with a particular reach length and chirality to reach the reaction site... Unless the computer "understands" these concepts building on some other set of principles, it won't be able to creatively generate solutions to those sorts of problems. In some cases, the "n" of directly analogous situations may be in the low single digits or even zero.

Brute-search is not idiotic testing. It is many times much faster to automate the search and then to move on to the next level/parameter (where you may get to start exploring again).

it might not be that easy. What happens when each iteration takes 30 minutes of setup, 4 hours -> overnight reaction time, 20 minutes of concentration, and a 30 minute silica gel column?

You parallelize and pipeline.

Interns?

Brute-force search is idiotic testing, almost by definition. The smart approach is sparse matrices, optimized either by staring at mountains of data (possible computer-assisted), or by gut feeling. Oftentimes the search space is so large (protein crystallization involves at least buffer, precipitant, pH, concentration) that you need to look at promising spots in the search space.

brute force is "naive" testing. it's almost never better (I say this as the person who ran exacycle, the world's largest brute force supercomputer).

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