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."

Comments

A couple of points

[SimianOverlord]

The robot scientist will have its work checked over by real people anyway, prior to any publication. It is likely to ignore any interesting, but narrowly irrelevant data and so could miss important discoveries. It can only work in fields where any underlying biological phenomenon is simple eg biochemical metabolic pathways. Many experiments contradict each other, where the underlying biology is extremely complex, with a host of competing factors and extremely sensitive to slight changes in experimental reagents. I'm a scientist, and I'm not too worried. Modern maths uses number crunchers too, like with the 3 colour map problem, but the proofs are always checked over. I guess the difference is these maths problems would take so long in human hours as the dissuade anyone from starting. This isn't the case in most of biology so I reckon the robot will not be useful in most disciplines.

Re:It's first invention

[Stephen Samuel]

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)?'