DailyDirt: Robot Scientists
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
People are usually pretty quick to admit that artificial intelligence programs are better than most humans at solving a lot of math problems. Human scientists have generally been needed to interpret data and make conclusions, but AI software could be catching up with scientists by coming up with their own hypotheses and conclusions. Here are just a few examples of programs that might be writing up their own PhD dissertations someday.
- Robot mathematicians like Graffiti have been around for a very long time, generating far more interesting conjectures than any human could. Interesting mathematical conjectures should be surprising, not too closely related to an existing conjecture, and not too specific. [url]
- Software dubbed Eureqa is analyzing (without help from humans) experimental data from biological systems to derive mathematical models for processes like glycolysis — and could potentially find new biological discoveries. And I’m sure we’ll see stories of robots found cheating by plagiarizing from Wikipedia soon. [url]
- Adam is the first automated scientist — successfully developing a hypothesis, performing experiments, refining its hypothesis into a novel discovery. Adam found three yeast genes that coded for an orphan enzyme. [url]
- A newer version of Adam, called Eve, is sifting through some of Adam’s data and looking to find her own discoveries about yeast genetics. Unfortunately, some intellectual property issues are delaying some of Adam and Eve’s latest publications. [url]
- To discover more interesting robot-related content, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: adam, ai, biology, conjectures, eureqa, eve, graffiti, math, orphan enzyme, robots, scientists, software, yeast genetics
Comments on “DailyDirt: Robot Scientists”
Michael, just to drop a quick note of appreciation for your piece here on the site each evening. Its one of the few things I look forward to after the daily burnout of politics and vapid “entertainment” news on many mainstream sites.
Carry on 😉
Re: Re:
Tom,
Thanks for reading! Hopefully you’re not the only one who likes these tidbits of random info… 😛
mikeho
I read another interesting article about Eureqa a while back:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/robot_invasion_can_computers_replace_scientists_.single.html
It’s part of a series on humans being replaced by computers, so it focuses more on the part where Eureqa solved a problem and nobody could figure out how the solution worked.
Adam is the first automated scientist — successfully developing a hypothesis, performing experiments, refining its hypothesis into a novel discovery.
A newer version of Adam, called Eve, is sifting through some of Adam’s data and looking to find her own discoveries about yeast genetics.
Jeez, even in the computer world, women have to have the last word! 😉
For more mundane tasks like finding the optimal set of rules to encode a video file you get mencgen
Quote:
Genetic programming is cool.