Go read Kevin Kelly’s impor­tant essay “Spec­u­la­tions on the Future of Sci­ence”. In par­tic­u­lar, read the sec­tions on “Com­bi­na­to­r­ial Sweep Explo­ration”, “Evo­lu­tion­ary Search”, “Mul­ti­ple Hypoth­e­sis Matrix”, “Pat­tern Aug­men­ta­tion”, “Adap­tive Real Time Exper­i­ments”, &c.

Now think not merely about sci­ence, but engi­neer­ing as well. Think about what makes one dif­fer­ent from the other. His­tor­i­cally, that is.

(Via 3quarksdaily)