Question: what expirment when most wrong?

James Stovold answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Hi woods069,

My experiments are a little different from most, as a lot of the time they are run on a computer simulation rather than in `real-life’. In that respect, it’s quite difficult to say if an experiment has gone wrong or if it has just not given me the answer I was expecting! Although, saying this, I do often get days where all my experiments give me the `wrong’ answer. I generally just go home when this happens!!

To give you an idea of what some of my experiments might consist of: at the moment I’m running an experiment in the lab that involves a small group of robots (around 4 or 5) who have to make decisions between them about how to make their way through a small maze. The problem with this is that it can’t actually go wrong. They just make it through the maze the quick way or the slow way — if they go the slow way then they’ve just not made the best decision, and I need to come up with a new way of controlling them! You find this a lot in science, every answer gives you four or five new questions…

James