Can Computers Generate New Ideas By Themselves?

Can many future scientific ideas be discovered by computer-automated brainstorming? Robert Pearson, founder of ParaMind Brainstorming Software, thinks it's a possibility. Since 1992, he's been selling a sophisticated brainstorming software product.

(PRWEB) April 30, 2004 -- Of interest to editors and journalists covering:
consumer software products, computers and technology, education and research.

Can many future scientific ideas be discovered by computer-automated brainstorming? Robert Pearson, founder of ParaMind Brainstorming Software, thinks it's a possibility.

"For anyone with an open mind and a bright outlook on the future, it should seem like an possible idea that there are many important ideas which we have not discovered. Over the years, I've come to see it as a fascinating possibility that computer-automated brainstorming can help us get to these ideas."

Pearson remembers sitting in a friend's apartment one night while still in college and wondering what ideas could generate other ideas. His friend was a computer science major, and Pearson was undecided but leaning towards English composition.

"I looked at all these books with computer notations. He had one called combinatorics. I liked the feeling of that word and the concept. At the time I was of the opinion that a single person could come up with very startling and useful ideas, if they just really applied themselves to it. I still believe that. A lot of people will go around saying 'there are really no new ideas' but I don't think this has any practical truth to it."

That night, Pearson realized that if we were to take all our words and put them in every possible meaningful combination, we would have every idea available to us, at least those that could be expressed in language. He realized we could then invent new words where the new combinations implied some shorthand was needed to express new ideas.

"The idea of pre-existing language holding the key to future scientific progress can be seen in this example. Imagine back to the time when Edison built the first phonograph. At that moment, some floppy disc drive terminology was already present with us. Someone back then could logically have seen the idea of the present personal computer if they looked at concepts such as the phonograph, the typewriter, and the motion picture. They just needed to combine the ideas all together, perhaps even with ideas of how the human brain works for memory, and start to think of new possible ideas that might have some value."

Pearson goes on to say, "A good dictionary should contain all the words that the books of our library contain. Our libraries are merely the intelligent interactions of the words of our dictionary in meaningful ways. If we were to exhaust the meaningful interactions of our words, we would come up with new discoveries that we are bound to stumble upon in the future by the ways we currently come up with ideas."

Pearson decided upon going with English in college and focused his studies on unusual ideas of composition. "I was this English major coming home from the library with books on every different type of science I could find. I was more interested in the terminology and structure of the textbook for presenting language than actually understanding all the deep concepts," Pearson admits. He wrote several papers on this idea while still at college getting his Bachelors in English. "There was hardly an assignment given that I couldn't somehow twist and use as an excuse to further my studies on this brainstorming idea," he jokes.

A few years after he graduated, he decided that building the software was going to be his goal. The program he came up with he called the ParaMind Brainstorming Program. It uses copying and merging of text the user types in, combining that text with new words that are grouped together in word categories. The word categories are words that have some relationship to each other, such as adjectives related to sight, or adverbs related to motion. The program comes with a database of 500 word categories, and users can add as many of their own as they like.

He called his company ParaMind Brainstorming Software and they have been selling versions of their software since 1992. Many of the customer base has been doctors and scientists but basically it is the general public who is using ParaMind. "Many of the buyers are from general types of businesses, not research labs. One told me that he was a holder of many patents and he thought the idea was a great one. Some buyers I've found out to be creative writers, such as a very famous rock lyricist who doesn't seem to want people to know he uses the program," Pearson wryly states. "It's very good for anyone who may have a writer or thinker's block or who may need to get a lot of variations on how one thing could be."

The process of coming up with these new ideas has become an automated one with the last release of ParaMind. "We recently released our first totally-automated version. You just enter in your sentence and press one button and the computer sends back hundreds of pages of merges related to your sentence, depending on the length of your original sentence."

ParaMind makes versions for both Windows and Mac computers, and will soon have a version in Linux.

For more information on ParaMind Brainstorming Software visit their web site at www.paramind.net

Media contact:
Robert Pearson
206-368-0979
paramind@paramind.net