Best, second-best, and good-enough explanations: How they matter to reasoning.

When Good Enough Is Best

In this issue of Neuron, Rinberg et al. show that mice use a speed-accuracy tradeoff in odor discrimination. Shorter sampling results in high performance for easy problems, and enforced longer sampling results in higher accuracy for difficult problems, but mice freely choose intermediate sampling durations and accuracy varies with difficulty. Reward value and task requirements may determine sam...

Only the best is good enough.

How Good Is Good Enough? A Multidimensional, Best-Possible Standard for Research Design

Recent years have seen a shift in methodological emphasis from the observable properties of a sample to its unobservable properties, that is, judgments about the process by which the data were generated. Considerations of research design have moved front and center. This article attempts to bridge discussions of experimental and quasi-experimental data and of quantitative and qualitative approa...

When second best is good enough: another probabilistic look at saturation mutagenesis.

We developed new criteria for determining the library size in a saturation mutagenesis experiment. When the number of all possible distinct variants is large, any of the top-performing variants (e.g., any of the top three) is likely to meet the design requirements, so the probability that the library contains at least one of them is a sensible criterion for determining the library size. By usin...

On the complexity of second-best abductive explanations

While looking for abductive explanations of a given set of manifestations, an ordering between possible solutions is often assumed. The complexity of finding/verifying optimal solutions is already known. In this paper we consider the computational complexity of finding secondbest solutions. We consider different orderings, and consider also different possible definitions of what a second-best s...