Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Invent Scientist
An anonymous reader writes "From the Boston Globe: 'Researchers said yesterday that they have created the world's first robotic scientist, a system that can form theories, devise experiments, and then carry out the experiments almost entirely without human help.' Now, if it could file patents and lawsuits, it would be ready to enter today's world of technology."
Robot Scientist Proves it's worth
But I wore the juice
Here is the paper coverring this topic. It appears in this weeks Nature.
The system, say its British creators, did just as well as biology graduate students in solving a problem in genetics, according to an article in today's issue of the journal Nature.
Yes, I bet it did. Especially when there's someone smarter next to him, with the answer in plain view...
how long until
To quote the article:= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11340206&dopt=Abstrac t)
The Robot Scientist works in an area of biology known as functional genomics, which is concerned with uncovering the roles that different genes play in the machinery of life. As a test, the system was told to discover how certain genes affect a complex chemical pathway inside yeast cells. The task for the computer, and a common one in biology, was to figure out which genes are involved in which steps of the pathway by testing yeast cells with different genes removed.
Sounds like it used a similar experimental setup that Ideker et al used to dissect the galactose metabolic pathways in yeast.
Integrated genomic and proteomic analyses of a systemically perturbed metabolic network
(URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
This was discussed in NewScientist yesterday.
DrkBr
It's not a legal entity. It can't patent anything.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
It hasn't been proven that a rules-based system can't come up with new proofs. It's simply that such a system cannot be complete. There's plenty of reason to believe that people can, in the end, be simulated with Turing machines. Unless you believe that humans have some unknown extra something, then any theoretical limitations to such a machine would also apply to its human creators.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Godel never showed that you can't come up with proofs any more. (Obviously - people still are proving things, even quite difficult ones like Fermat's Last Theorem.)
His Incompleteness Theorem was more subtle than that: (IIRC) it said that you can't guarantee to either prove or disprove an arbitrary theorem. It might be possible to prove it or disprove it, but in the general case you can't guarantee it.
Think of it in terms of sets: you can quite easily decide that a Dodge Viper should go into the set containing all cars, and that an Athlon XP 2400+ should not. However you can't make a (correct) statement either way about whether the set containing all sets that do not contain themselves should contain itself or not.
Proofs are perfectly possible in certain cases, but thanks to self-referentiality you can't prove everything. You may not even be able to decide whether some statements are provable or not.
I'll mention a book that's been on my must-read list for a while now but I still haven't got round to: Douglas Hofstader's "Godel, Escher, Bach": apparently it's very good at helping to understand such things.
This sentence no verb.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I am surprised Stephen Muggleton didn't also
get a mention in the article, as this sort of
thing (inductive logic, leading to hypotheses
and indications of new experiments to conduct)
was very much his baby.
AaronGTurner
Possession is 0.9, as they say. We're a government facility that owns all sorts of patents. Our scientists have no claim on the patented processes they create here; anything created for the agency, with taxpayer dollars, is licensed by the agency (and, technically, owned by the American people). So my guess is, your robot's patents would go to the agency or facility in which it performs its research.
The fun part is determining how/when these things become legal persons.