Mr Jack writes:
Dembski's had a paper published in
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, not a journal you've heard of? Me neither. It's a pretty low tier journal.
I've been a member of the IEEE (Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for over 30 years. Their technical journals are generally of very high quality, and I've published there myself. Peer review is strong in my field, about half my submissions have been rejected.
But the IEEE has over a hundred journals across many fields of electrical engineering, and I'm only familiar with the few that deal with my own technical field. I've never heard of this particular journal, but I'm not sure that Mark Chu-Carroll's "low tier" characterization is accurate.
IEEE Transactions of Systems, Man and Cybernetics began life in the IEEE's predecessor organization the IRE in 1960 under the title
IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, and it's undergone several name changes since. The description of the journal:
Aims and Scope writes:
The fields of systems engineering and human machine systems: systems engineering includes efforts that involve issue formulation, issue analysis and modeling, and decision making and issue interpretation at any of the lifecycle phases associated with the definition, development, and implementation of large systems. It also includes efforts that relate to systems management, systems engineering processes, and a variety of systems engineering methods such as optimization, decision making, modeling, and simulation. Human machine systems includes cognitive ergonomics, system test and evaluation, and human information processing concerns in systems and organizations.
Here's the paper's abstract:
Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Computers, despite their speed in performing queries, are completely inadequate for resolving even moderately sized search problems without accurate information to guide them. We propose three measures to characterize the information required for successful search: 1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search; 2) exogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem-specific information; and 3) active information, which, as the difference between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target. This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.
Sounds pretty innocuous. Even for IEEE members, journal access for each journal must be paid for, so I can't access the paper through the IEEE , but it's available elsewhere on-line, this copy is at Dembski's co-author's website:
Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success
At first I thought Cho-Carroll's criticisms must stem from his familiarity with an ID version of the same paper, but as I started browsing through the paper I found this right on page 1 (page 1051, actually):
Dembski and Marks writes:
Such information does not magically materialize but instead results from the action of the programmer who prescribes how knowledge about the problem gets folded into the search algorithm.
There it is, bold as all get out, the central claim of creationists: there's no such thing as new information, and genetic algorithms work because the answers are preprogrammed in. Of course, that's not what Dembski and Marks really said. The peer reviewers, very likely unfamiliar with creationism and ID, interpreted this in the context of actual information theory and understood Dembski and Marks to be saying that search algorithms must have knowledge of the structure of the search space, but not of the content of the search space itself.
Given Cho-Carroll's and my own familiarity with the lingo of ID, this paper fairly cries out "bogus ID paper attempting to gain legitimacy by placement in a legitimate journal," but to electrical engineer peer-reviewers specializing in human/computer interactions it probably looked like a rather pedestrian but worthy paper. I think the journal was duped.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Fix formatting.
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