Do software-generated "connections" really generate inspiration?

Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 27, 2007 at 03:49 PM

I’ve never had a flash of insight prompted by “connections” made from off-the-shelf software. On the other hand, I’ve had some good insights from statistical analysis and machine learning algorithms used in a research context.

I think the main issue is that most off-the-shelf software automated connection algorithms are fairly simplistic. For the most part, they all run either classification algorithms or clustering algorithms. You don’t, for example, find outliner-style programs that do decision tree induction or principal component analysis. Not in an easy way anyway. Even classification is underused.

—Chris