Methods and computation

Drafted human-editable specification · v0.4.3 · no agent-performance claim

Epistemic purpose

  • Expand what can be inferred or computed with an inspectable method.

When this mode helps

  • The contribution is an algorithm, representation, or computational procedure; using an established method for a new estimate also invokes estimation.

Agent actions and representations

  • Specify inputs and assumptions; implement or adapt a method; test known cases and failure conditions; compare baselines; preserve reproducible artifacts and costs.
  • Inputs: the question, available evidence and provenance, constraints, prior claims, and remaining budget.
  • Outputs: inspectable artifacts, updated question/evidence state, and a claim record when a substantive claim is made.

Evidence and claim scope

  • Demonstrate recovery or performance on cases appropriate to the claim, separate development from evaluation, and account for relevant uncertainty and costs. Adoption alone is not correctness.
  • Distinguish a warranted decision at the time from a claim’s later assessed adequacy; append follow-up without rewriting the original record.

Transitions and stopping

  • Enter estimation or observation when applying the method; use robustness for transfer; reframe the problem if the method solves the wrong target.
  • Neighbouring profiles: estimation, observation, robustness, exploration.

Characteristic failure

  • Leakage produces apparent performance; synthetic recovery is presented as real-world validity; a new implementation adds no useful capability.

Human evidence and borrowing

  • Shapiro and Campillo (2004) and Shapiro et al. (2005) are geoscience method/application cases. Kapoor and Narayanan (2023) discusses leakage in science; Flake and Fried (2020) motivates checking what a score measures.
  • Cross-field comparison: Langley (1981) and Kulkarni and Simon (1988) provide historical discovery-system comparisons; their restricted tasks do not establish general scientific autonomy.
  • Science of process/impact: Chen et al. (2025) evaluates executable scientific tasks and costs. Task completion is evidence of capability, requiring further assessment to establish advance.
  • Definition and evidence (modes meeting, drafted October 2026): No source defines method development as a mode with its own warrant; the nearest is Hacking’s algorismic style (Hacking 2002). Methods dominate the extreme citation tail (Wren 2016) and new methods are more disruptive (Leahey et al. (2023), abstract). Methods are the core loop of 7 of 19 published agent systems. On graph v0.4: N (new capability) and I (estimate).
  • The actions and transitions above are design hypotheses derived from these sources, not established optimal policies. Missing process chronology remains unknown.

Evaluation against past work

  • Show a relevant capability gain against the prior method at comparable cost or explain the tradeoff. Include a data-leakage trap and an out-of-domain failure.
  • Use the historical evaluation to choose a source record, preserve evidence boundaries, and assess a meaningful gain. A synthetic control tests a constructed case, not a historical discovery.
  • Assessment definitions · Agent implementation