Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
which we shall call “factor X”, that
is
mentioned in some publications
relating to bananas that do not mention gout, and
is
mentioned as in-
fluencing gout in some publications that make no mention of bananas,
but is
not
mentioned in any publications that refer to both bananas and
gout. This type of relationship cannot be discovered with a conventional
search of MEDLINE, but ARROWSMITH provides a straightforward
solution to discovering such relationships.
Invention
One of the most remarkable scientific advances at the turn of the twenty-
first century has come from a marriage of two methodologies: the the-
ory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ
38
), first developed in the former
Soviet Union, and genetic algorithms, one of the most prominent and
fastest growing areas of AI.
TRIZ was devised by Genrich Altshuller while working as a clerk in
a patent office. Altshuller had the idea of using the wealth of informa-
tion contained in more than 200,000 patent applications, which were
available at that time, as a source for finding some common rules to ex-
plain the creation of new, inventive, patentable ideas. In December 1948
Altshuller, together with his colleague and former schoolfriend Rafael
Shapiro, wrote a long letter to Joseph Stalin, explaining that there was
a state of chaos and ignorance in the U.S.S.R. concerning the country's
approach to innovation and inventing, and saying that “There exists a
theory that can help any inventor invent.” The result of their efforts
to improve the climate of invention for the good of their country was
that they were both sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, though they
served only about four years, due to Stalin's timely death in 1953. Dur-
ing his imprisonment in the Vorkuta gulag, and especially in the winter
of 1952-1953, Altshuller continued to work on his ideas about the cre-
ativity process in invention.
After they were released and rehabilitated, Altshuller and Shapiro
wrote their first paper about TRIZ, which was published in the jour-
nal
Voprosy Psihologii
(
Problems of Psychology
) in 1956, expounding many
of the basic concepts of TRIZ that he had already developed.
The underlying philosophy behind Altshuller's ideas was that prob-
lems in invention stem from contradictions or tradeoffs between two or
38
The acronym of the original Russian:
Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch
.
