New family of materials discovered by accident
Does this suggest a problem with using Bayes to generate hypotheses? My impression is that Bayes includes generating hypotheses which look in the most likely places. Are there productive ways of generating accidents, or is paying attention when something weird happens the best we can do?
An example of using Bayes to "generate hypotheses" that's successful is the mining/oil industry that makes spatial models and computes posterior expected reward for different drilling plans. For general-science type hypotheses you'd ideally want to put a prior on a potentially very complicated space (e.g. the space of all programs that compute the set of interesting combinations of reagents, in your example) and that typically isn't attempted with modern algorithms. This isn't to say there isn't room to make improvements on the state of the art with more mundane approaches.
Previous Open Thread
You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.