Probably Dance

I’ve been collecting advice from various sources about how to do research. I can’t find a good place that collects this, so let’s see if I can create one.

The idea is that this should be something similar as George Polya’s “How to Solve It” but for doing research instead of solving problems. There is a lot of overlap between those two ideas, so I will quote a lot from Polya, but I will also add ideas from other sources. I should say though that my sources are mostly from Computer Science, Math and Physics. So this list will be biased towards those fields.

My other background here is that I work in video game AI so I’ve read a lot of AI literature and have found parallels between solving AI problems and solving research problems. So I will try to generalize patterns that AI research has found about how to solve hard problems.

A lot of practical advice will be for getting you unstuck. But there will also be advice for the general approach to doing research.

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