Data Mining Used to Create New Materials

Roland Piquepaille writes "MIT researchers have successfully integrated data mining tools and modern methods of quantum mechanics. They've designed software which can help predict the crystal structures of materials. To simplify, they say they've used methods used by online sales sites to suggest books to customers. And it seems to work: they claim they can determine in days the properties of atomic structures that might have taken months before. Read more for additional references and pictures."

Comments

About damn time-A Joyous noise.

[Anonymous Coward]

"its about time someone did something worthwhile with datamining ... i'm so sick of everything datamining is used for being big brother/1984 related."

That's just because the cynic grabs all the attention. Datamining has been used for years, by the fortune 500, and you don't hear much about that.

MIT sued by Amazon for patent infringement!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Considering how broadly software patents are worded now a days, I would not be surprised if MIT gets sued by Amazon for patent infringement.

Aha !

[Anonymous Coward]

Transparent aluminum anyone ?

Principles of the universe

[suv4x4]

There are two surprisingly simple and "dumb" principles that exist in our world.

The first is called evolution (random mutation, breeding of the fittest) the result of which is basically everything around us, and it has resurfaced in computer programming as genetic programming, which essentially uses random processes and selection to create new inventions, mechanisms and even intelligent virtual creatures.

The second I'll call "intelligent observation". It's basically how animals and people learn everything they know, by observing and applying "what seems to make sense" in other areas of our lives, even without understanding the underlying mechanisms (and how we discovered fire, or tools by observing similar nature mechanisms/animals). This has resurfaced in computer programming as data mining.

Data mining and genetic programming: these two beat any patent, any existing algorithm, because they are not crippled by our limited brain capacity to understand the world around us. Expect a lot more of both in computer science and our lives in the following years.

Re:Principles of the universe

[GeffDE]

Your view on genetic algorithms is just plain wrong.

One of the reasons that "Intelligent Design" is so palatable to so many people is that nature and life are so damn complex. There is a textbook called Molecular Biology of the Cell; this book's aim is to precisely define the chemical pathways and biological structures that constitute a living cell, and it is roughly 2000 pages long. It is still outrageously incomplete. This massive tome is looking at something that is so incredibly minute that you are formed by trillions of them. It takes a 2000 page book to incompletely describe the simplest part of you. What is mind-boggling to many people (and simply awe-inspiring to the rest) is that such a simple rule as "survival of the fittest/random mutation" could create so complex a system. The fact is, such complexity is inherent in the system, and that complexity arises out of simplicity. A great tutorial on that is Cellular Automata.

Now, you do bring up an interesting point about the positive feedback loop that our brains have created with technology. But if you extend your scenario to a few years after "The Almighty CAD Program" is designed, you may indeed reach that technological singularity, where a machine can design another machine inside a CAD program, and, a few years later, might be able to either make that machine with the automated robots already used for assembly, or even emulate it with its own hardware. Now you have reached the point where "genetic algorithms" are doing exactly what you have claimed they cannot. Genetic algorithms only tackle problems in a simple problem state because they have not been allowed to evolve enough. Bacteria are much simpler than humans, and they also first came around billions of years ago. After nature had time to evolve from the bacteria, it got more and more complex. So too will genetic algorithms.

Lame name.

[Inoshiro]

"The second I'll call "intelligent observation"."

You know, most people would call it statistics (in this example, using a mathematical model to predict results), or the scientific method (in general, observing repeatable events).

Re:Lame name.

[haluness]

Very true - data mining is the new buzzword. The techniques used in data mining are prettyold and standard. Thats not to say that theres no research - theres a ton of stuff that can be done especially when handling large datasets. But fundamentally, it's well known statistical modeling - just rephrased for the 'Age of Marketing' :)

Re:Lame name.

[shadowbearer]

  So wouldn't patents on methods in data mining be the same thing as patenting mathematical methods, specifically stastistical methods?

  (It's an honest question)

SB

I, for one

[eclectro]

I welcome our cyrstalline entity overlords. Oh, wait, they were killed off in season five.

Like Amazon? Really? Cool!

[Gary W. Longsine]

People who liked room temperature superconductors also liked:

• transparent aluminum [Add to Cart]
• broad spectrum LEDs [Add to Cart]
• efficient peltier effect alloys [Add to Cart]
• 3D holographic memory array crystals [Add to Cart]

NOW How Much Would You Pay? (TM)

Re:About damn time

[Kohath]

Yeah. Datamining killed my whole family and gave my dog the runs.

It's the most destructive thing since the PATRIOT ACT, which wiped out most of the population of the Pacific Northwest and caused the birds in my area to sing an octave higher.

Modern generalized thinking

[w33t]

Reading about how a program can find something that a human could not, or would not, brings to mind a notion I had the other day.

I am learning Java (and OO programming best practices in general), and am pretty heavily into it at this point. I was tooling along, writing some code to test some aspects of the language when I suddenly realized that much of what I was typing I was kind of unaware of.

When I had first begun studying in earnest a few months ago I remember how closely I paid attention to the smallest syntactical details. But now that much of this has become wrote I found myself automatically just cruising through - not really conceptualizing what I was doing. But it was still working.

I went back into my little code and delved into a deeper reading of what I had written. It was all correct according to theory - and I could recall all the little subtleties of how Java's VM was interpreting this and that - but while I was writing it I was giving no thought to it. It just happened; it just came out of me.

Now, hearing about these programs that can mine data and find things that human eyes would miss - and relatedly hearing about machines that can invent - I wonder if one day invention, discovery and the like will all be wrote.

I wonder if, like my mindless coding moment, things will just happen - research will just occur - without really a second thought of the "low-level" processes that currently are held so dear.

It's interesting. It might be akin to mathematics in some ways - wherein you can generalize a large body of calculation and come to a conclusion without actually outputting the raw numerical form.

It is an approximation, yes. But with some work the approximation can be decomposed into elementary school level math expressions - if you really want to go through all that work.

But why decompose it, it works fine generalized (much better for humans in fact).

It's interesting to me - this modern high-level generalization.

Re:How useful is this?

[DerangedAlchemist]

No chemist will ever trust a computer result without doing the full lab work. This can still be incredibly useful.

Consider if each thorough test takes 6 months for 3000-4000 possibilities. If the computer can tell you the 5-10 compounds that are likely to work, in a few years you can have a product (or a PhD). Otherwise you were looking at nearly a thousand years before finding something.

Re:if they are using Amazon's data mining...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

You're telling me. One time I accidentally clicked on something like this and my recommendations were skewed for months afterwards.