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Scientists Invent Scientist

Posted by michael on from the working-yourself-out-of-a-job dept.

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."

3 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Related BBC Link by vbprisoner · · Score: 5, Informative

    Robot Scientist Proves it's worth

    --
    But I wore the juice
  2. Re:Did they solve the halting problem too? by adrianbaugh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:It's first invention by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Informative
    That's just the first step in the analysis. The fun starts with: 'does the person who invented it have the right to patent it's inventions? Does the person who owns it have the right (if different than the person who created it)?'
    Not being a legal person, this robot is no different than any other computer program. The owner/operator (individual, or the institution that pays for the individual or paid for the 'bot), owns the rights to it's output.

    The fun part is determining how/when these things become legal persons.