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Robot scientists can think for
themselves
U.S.
Thu Apr 2, 2009 2:30pm EDT
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LONDON (Reuters) - Watch out scientists -you may be replaced by a robot.
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Two teams of researchers said on Thursday
they had created machines that could
reason, formulate theories and discover
scientific knowledge on their own, marking
a major advance in the field of artificial
intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological
systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or
understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
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At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have
created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on
yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next
experiment.
It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent
scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of
baker's yeast.
"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and
we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview.
"People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent
robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own
experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to
do that."
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Their next robot, Eve, will have much more brain power and will be put to
work searching for new medicines.
King hopes the application of intelligent robotic thinking to the process of
sifting tens of thousands of compounds for potential new drugs will be
particularly valuable in the hunt for treatments for neglected tropical
diseases like malaria.
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King published his findings in the journal Science, alongside a second
paper from Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New
York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the
fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.
Just by crunching the numbers -- and without any prior instruction in
physics -- the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton's laws
of motion and other properties.
Lipson does not think robots will make scientists obsolete any day soon,
but believes they could take over much of the routine work in research
laboratories.
"One of the biggest problems in science today is finding the underlying
principles in areas where there are lots and lots of data," he told reporters
in a conference call. "This can help in accelerating the rate at which we
can discover scientific principles behind the data."
(Additional reporting by Stuart McDill; editing by Maggie Fox and Tim
Pearce)
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