In article <C4390H.493.1 at cs.cmu.edu>, valdes+ at CS.CMU.EDU (Raul Valdes-Perez) writes:
> We should keep in mind the old joke about bad marketing:
> to determine the demand for a new bridge, go to the river
> and count how many people swim across. The analogy is not
> exact, but the spirit is similar.
But a biologist would ask: Why are they swimming across?
Biological methods may not be an easy way to answer this question, but if the
computer scientists build a bridge it just makes them cross faster but gives no
understanding of why they are doing it.
This perhaps explains why computer scientists approached the problem of
lemmings by writing a game. Population control would be a better way to keep
the numbers down (of lemmings that is, not computer scientists - we need
evidence of a genetic cause to identify their parents before we go that far :-)
At least they didn't build a bridge across the North Sea...
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