The Scientific Community Game (SCG) for Innovation and Education in STEM Domains

Abstract

We propose to promote the central role of the Scientific Community Game (SCG) for Innovation and Education in domains where claims are being proposed and refuted. This includes all STEM domains. Applications of SCG are: (1) Engaging a computational scientific community in a collaborative/competitive game to improve their knowledge base. SCG offers an effective alternative to the traditional publication approach where the practical benefits of techniques are difficult to compare. With SCG, the best practical computational techniques will stand out as the winners. (2) Engaging a group of software developers in a collaborative/competitive game to better solve a computational problem. SCG serves as a generic software process model when computational innovation is important to the project. (3) Engaging a computational learning community in a second order learning environment about a STEM domain.

SCG is supported by four established areas: (1) Group organization. Warren Bennis in his book: Organizing Genius, The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, says: "you create an atmosphere of creative stress, everyone competing to solve one problem." (2) Karl Popper's approach to scientific knowledge based on refutation (3) Serious Games, including the notions of social welfare (collaboration through selfish competition) and equilibria and (4) Logic, specifically quantifier logic games with two players Exists and ForAll (going back to 1898), Lorenzen's approach to dialogic games and logics with incomplete information, specifically Hintikka's and Sandu's independence-friendly logic known as IF logic.

SCG is a platform for generating games, each defined by a playground definition. A playground defines a virtual world for the participating players and is designed in such a way that the players innovate in and focus on a specific area of interest.

SCG let's the players unfold their creativity in an optimal way. It organizes the crowd by letting it work in parallel on solving the problem while keeping the communication between the players to a minimum. The communication is engaging the players in a scientific discourse to determine who has the better solution to the problem. Communication is also used to level the playing field by sharing the best solution approaches with the entire community (after the "patent period" has expired).

A second important application of SCG is in education: to educate the students in an area you define a playground where the students learn through play. This approach matches well with creating dialog components of online courses in STEM areas.

What are the problems that can be solved by SCG? They are of the form: Given a set of at least two claims, what is the subset of "good" claims and how can the good claims be sucessfully defended. Often one is interested in the defense algorithm. Good can mean,e.g, "true" or "optimal". SCG is about distinguishing good claims from bad claims where the definitions of good and bad are precisely given. For example, the two claims could be: (1) There is Global Warming and (2) There is no Global Warming. The playground definition contains the refutation protocols for these two claims. Many playgrounds contain a large number of claims and SCG will help determine which ones are good. There are playgrounds for finding efficient techniques to solve complex optimization problems, like protein folding (see EteRNA) and playgrounds to develop energy efficient solutions.

For more detailed information: SCG Home Page