- Title: UNITED KINGDOM: First robot to do original science
- Date: 3rd April 2009
- Summary: ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY, ABERYSTWYTH, WALES, UK (APRIL 01, 2009) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF ROBOTS IN THE COMPUTER SCIENCE LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF ABERYSTWYTH. SOUNDBITE(ENGLISH): PROFESSOR ROSS KING, DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY SAYING "It is autonomous. On its own it can think of the hypotheses and then do the experiments and we've checked that it'
- Embargoed: 18th April 2009 13:00
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- Location: United Kingdom
- Country: United Kingdom
- Reuters ID: LVAAQY5PTUOGRO9SKSHFA0D7SGGK
- Story Text: Two teams of researchers said they had created machines that could reason like scientists 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 unravelling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modelling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
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 independently discovered new scientific knowledge -- 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," Ross said.
"People have been working on this since the 1960s trying to do this. 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."
Their next robot, Eve, will have a lot more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.
Ross 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.
"What you do in drug design is, traditionally, that you just test thousands upon thousands of compounds against what is called an assay which is designed to tell you about whether its going to be a compound for the disease or not. And what we've done in Eve is to make that process a bit cleverer, a bit more intelligent, so the computer itself gets to chose which compounds to try next," he said.
Ross published his findings in the journal Science, alongside a second paper from Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University, 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 doesn't think robots will make scientists obsolete any day soon, but they could take over much of the grunt work in research laboratories.
"One of the biggest problems in science today is finding the underlying principles in areas where there's lot 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 underlying data."
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