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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."
will be to make something to do its work for it, just like the scientists did.
Robot Scientist Proves it's worth
But I wore the juice
What happens when it decides that it's human masters are no longer needed and should be experimented on?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
From the article:
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.
In other news, a calculator does just as well as a PhD mathematician at solving arithmetic problems.
Come on, it's a neat invention, but it's solving a closed problem-- not worthy of being called a scientist.
It's completely based on who puts the most money into it, and what your political motivations are.
It's indistinguishable from modern scientists.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
are a close approximation of an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, not only will you eventualy get Shakespere but some cool research papers as well
-jon
Here is the paper coverring this topic. It appears in this weeks Nature.
When asked whether he was, in fact, the robot the scientists had invented he replied "la la la" and hung up the phone.
Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur
If not, it won't do well, besides the lack of ability to think creatively.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
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.
It's true that we have gone from doubling our knowledge of the world in three years to just eighteen months. NASA has data that is deteriating before it can be analized, so I think the following conderns are unfounded:
Some scientists questioned whether the system, dubbed the "Robot Scientist" by its creators, deserved the title of scientist. For human scientists, some of the most interesting discoveries happen when researchers notice something they weren't looking for and suddenly change course...
I think there is plenty of accumulated data that just needs basic analysis.
It's really interesting to think about this system and IBM's new Webcrawler in terms of AI though, and what we might accomplish in the next ten years.
Can I bum a sig?
Or else there can't be any "peer review" of its publications.
...and the robotic scientist creates a better robotic scientist and so on and so forth...
This has "Escher drawing" written all over it.
(Yeah, I am a scientist myself ...)
Just as every college student has suspected at one time or another -- a machine could be doing their homework for them, and they could be doing something interesting instead.
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You are what you think.
People in AI have worked on automated scientific discovery for decades, and some of their systems have also had robotic components. This seems like a tweak and a good sales job, not a breakthrough.
In the late 1800s mathamatitions had this idea that you could write a bunch of rules that would allow undergraduates to devise proofs. This had a lot of interest until Godel (and others) proved that it can't be done.
In traditional /. fashion I didn't read the artical. Still it seems to me that either this is very limited in what it can research, or it can't work. If it is limited, there isn't much news about a robot programed to do something either too repeatative for a human to finish, or too dangerious for a human to do. If it can't work, well I still welcome the limited expiriments it can do which can enhance knowledge, if we don't treat it like the end of all science when this machine does all it can do.
Is it certified 3 Laws Safe? If so, no worries.
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.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
write proposals? That seems to be 95% of my advisor's job. No science can be done without the money to do it with.
This was discussed in NewScientist yesterday.
DrkBr
Science requires some kind of passion/imagination/interest to start. After that, you employ scientific method to create knowledge. But, I don't think we fully understand the first part.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Other members of the mad science community criticized the University of Wales for wasting time on nonvital research, noting that they were wasting time developing a robot scientist that could have been spent on developing a sexy female robot assistant. Others noted that, despite years of attempts by the mad science community, Tokyo has STILL not been destroyed.
The University of Wales group defended its research, noting that the work on the lessons learned in developing the robot scientist could likely be applied to developing a sexy female robot assistant. They also charged that bringing up the War On Tokyo was undue.
"In general, I am sick of this attitude. I am tired of seeing comments on USENET like 'horrifying lizard-men hybrid created, Tokyo still not destroyed'. Clearly destroying Tokyo should be the first priority of the mad science community, but this does not mean all other research should cease or that research that does not attain this goal should be abandoned. This is unduly unwarranted in this case, however, as the robot scientist may well be the critical breakthrough we have needed in our long running quest to destroy Tokyo." said Ross D. King, the system's co-inventor and a professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in a surprisingly candid press release today. The press release then went on to outline a possible scenario in which the robotic scientist could break free of its masters, escaping into exile with a vile hatred of all that lives to build an army of its own robots to challenge Mankind.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
When will this robot find some interesting theory and experimental proof that qualifies it for a Nobel prize? (Or would qualify it for the prize if a human had done the same work?)
This invention demonstrates the full power of computers to mass-produce logical human thought processes. Although it may be very hard to reduce the mental processes behind creating theories and experiments to a set of algorithmic processes, once done the possibilities are endless. A robotic scientist can be mass produced for far less money and in far less time than it takes to grow a new Ph.D person.
Software is, in my opinion, a more powerful invention than was writing. While writing encodes and distributes static thoughts, software encodes and distributes the dynamic thought processes.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"In a number of areas scientific data is being generated at enormous rates, creating the need for the automated analysis of the data," said Ross D. King,
So basically it collects hundreds of terabytes of data, then uses certain algorithms to analyze it in an effort to try to spot a trend.
So far so good, but the part where it tries to interpret the data in a more innovative way by creating theories is for me the breakthrough. I can't help but think that credit (if a new theory is discovered) must go to those who wrote the algorithm.
Science: Scientists Invent Scientist
I predict that the next story will be:
Slashdot: Slashdotters Slashdot Slashdot
And then it is just a short step using this to stop scientific research unless they get a cut, because it would be unauthorized use of their patented processes and methods. Even if implemented in a biological system like a brain
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I don't know, maybe it won't invent the cure for cancer, maybe it won't be able to decode the sequence and meanings of life - but just like a calculator, it will automate known procedures. This will, at the very least, increase the efficiency of what human scientists can do. I agree, it is limited to what it has been programmed to do. The AI portion is probably not advanced enough to figure out extremly complex, unknown issues (and it probably doesn't get things like 'hunches.'). But considering that figuring out how yeast cells work is a lot more complex then a calculator, it is still an impressive piece of technology, that will (hopefully) help scientists out. -Avi
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Do a google for "lenat" and "eurisko" and you'll find a system that did this thirty years ago. Designed by Doug Lenat, Eurisko was a software that created and tested new mathematical theorems. Didn't evolve much after that, because there's a lot more to science than just creating and proving theorems.
...what would happen if he decided to become a Creationist? Wouldn't that be embarrassing! ;-)
Everyone knows that Android Scientist tech is totally useless, because it perminately takes up a population slot and can't be moved to another job. Now, if we could successfully research Autolabs, we could really leap ahead of the Klackons, and maybe even keep up with the Psilons!
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
I know the article said this robot had no mobility, but just imagine if it bred with this robot and escaped!
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
This could be wonderful news for the advancement of science in general. Most of it is trial and error. Mix these 2 together and see if has the desired effect. There may be 10 or 20 thousand combinations to try. That's what experimental science is all about. Now if a grad student could just setup one of these things to test all combinations until either the wanted result appears, interesting things not predicted happen, or favorable or disfavorable results happen that could be useful else where. I could see a robot testing combinations until a given event is true. How would software flag "interesting results?"
Example: Scientist is looking for non-stick film to apply to pots. Robot is testing combinations. Does it notify the scientist if say this combination makes the pot super conductive, but things still stick to it?
Just like the "programmer creates programmer" thing. Code generators have been around for ages, but I have yet to see a program that can think up a program for itself (or even turn a requirements-document into actual working software).
welcome our Turing-complete overlords.
Or not, since in the end they will all fall over trying to determine whether the halting problem has been accounted for in their theory-making systems.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
The *true* test of a modern robot-scientist is getting money ...
Of course, some might say that even the proverbial room of monkeys with typewriters throwing feces could produce something incomprehensible enough to seem like genius to grant committees... Considering some of the things that have gotten money in the past, the level of writing competence for the robot to get money for it's experiments might be really low. ;-)
Lots of people are commenting that this isn't that useful because the robot won't come up with new scientific breakthroughs. But I suspect that none of these people have actually done biotech lab work.
Lab work largely consists of doing the same thing over and over and over and over. My partner is doing a PhD in molecular biology, and I have spent more than a few nights and weekends helping her by being a robot. For example, one Sunday I spent about 10 hours gathering "growth curve" data. This involves taking dozens of vials of growing yeast, and measuring their optical density every 2 hours or so. To do this, you take the vials out of a spinning wheel, put them in a tube holder, carry the tubes to a desk, put new tips on a pipette, mix the tubes to stir them up again, suck out some of the fluid, and squirt the fluid into a smaller tube. Then you put the large tubes back, carry the little tubes to the optical density device, insert them, run the measurement, print out the results, pull out the little tubes, put them in a styrofoam holder for posterity, and repeat.
This process was incredibly labor intensive -- I had about 10 minutes of rest time every 2 hours, over the course of 10 hours. And after those 10 hours my partner took over and continued the process for another 10 hours.
Not only would a robot have been a welcome relief to this process, we actually spent quite a while discussing the specific requirements and possible design of such a robot.
A robot like this is useful because it provides the equivalent of a compiler and automated test suite. The interesting things in biological science do not come from grad students running through the grunt work manually -- they come from grad students using their brains to design the experiment and then analyze the results.
Obviously this robot won't replace the grad students entirely. But it might let them be vastly more productive.