The Search for a Search - Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search

Intellectual Standards. Are we holding ourselves to high intellectual standards? Are we in the least self-critical about our work? Are we sober or immodest about our work? Do we demand precision and rigor from our each other? Do we examine each other's work with intense critical scrutiny and speak our minds freely in assessing it? Or do we try to keep all our interactions civil, gentlemanly, and diplomatic (perhaps so as not to give the appearance of dissension in our ranks)? Does the mood of our movement alternate between the smug and the indignant -- smug when we hold the upper hand, indignant when we are criticized? Do we react to adverse criticism like first-time novelists who are dismayed to discover that their masterpiece has been trashed by the critics? Or do we take adverse criticism as an occasion for tightening and improving our work?

"The Search for a Search - Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search" is an article by William Dembski and Robert Marks which appeared in the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (abstract, full text) The article is a follow-up to Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success which appeared in Ieee Transactions On Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

The gist of the article is that Dembski and Marks attempt to demonstrate some difficulties with information searches, building on the existing "no free lunch" theorem, which states (colloquially) that no process for optimizing a search is "better" than any other when applied to all searches. Dembski extends this idea further, and though he does not touch on intelligent design in this paper, he has elsewhere made it clear that he interprets NFL as supporting intelligent design, an idea that has been strongly criticized by no less than David Wolpert, one of the authors of the original NFL paper.