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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.
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
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
(Yeah, I am a scientist myself ...)
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.
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
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.
Science: Scientists Invent Scientist
I predict that the next story will be:
Slashdot: Slashdotters Slashdot Slashdot
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.
...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."
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.