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Robot Makes Scientific Discovery (Mostly) On Its Own
Hugh Pickens writes "A science-savvy robot called Adam has successfully developed and tested its first scientific hypothesis, discovering that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes which encourage biochemical reactions in yeast, then ran an experiment with its lab hardware to test its predictions, and analyzed the results, all without human intervention. Adam was equipped with a database on genes that are known to be present in bacteria, mice and people, so it knew roughly where it should search in the genetic material for the lysine gene in baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ross King, a computer scientist and biologist at Aberystwyth University, first created a computer that could generate hypotheses and perform experiments five years ago. 'This is one of the first systems to get [artificial intelligence] to try and control laboratory automation,' King says. '[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.' Adam has cost roughly $1 million to develop and the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can. King's group has also created another robot scientist called Eve dedicated to screening chemical compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that could combat diseases such as malaria.
If I ever do cutting edge research on robot AI, please punch me if I try to name my new robots "Adam" or "Eve".
... it starts experimenting with inter-dimensional portal guns.
Humanity in peril!
... of developing a new pathogen - like an airborne ebola virus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
the union of scientists. You thought Teamsters were nasty? You ain't seen jack squat. WE SPLICE GENES!!! WE SPLIT ATOMS!!! WE (probably) MAKE BLACKHOLES!!!
Ross King, gutless traitor, you and your tin cans, your names will live in infamy.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Oh, sure, it's neat-o. But you could probably afford hundreds of grad students to do the work for the same price.
'[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.'
I think this is called "flow control". This was invented before electricity. It was around before the term "science" existed.
So this is the first time it's applied to *this specific* operation. It's been around in robotics ever since there were "robots".
Here's a good example.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
"...the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can."
There is no 'thought process'. 1's & 0's...that's it. Anthropomorphising the over priced little key-puncher isn't fooling anyone.
Give me $1 mil and I'll put a scare into Adam that he won't soon forget. I can read 3k WPM as well as raw postscript, palms, tarot cards and bar codes with the naked eye. I can intuit nearly 30 spoken languages on body english alone and smell phony money at the bottom of a sweaty pocket. I don't need no stink'n badges and I know when to cross to the other side of the street. Adam might get better press, but until it can order at a drive thru and sort used car parts based on cross-over and eBay thru-put, I'm comfortable sleeping in.
Wonder if you can hack that robot, does it run *NIX or Windows?. Because if it's hackeable someone could find it very "useful"
[cue code snippets telling the machine to do fun stuff like LSD or MDMA or hashoil]
I knew that Ross was up to something bigger than protein secondary structure prediction when I met him 15 years ago at ICRF. He was a great Prolog fan then. Now he has probably bunch of graduate students coding for him.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
My friend invented a robot just like that, it took time to discern its surroundings and make logical conclusions about them. At which point it abandoned all its data and repeatedly ran into walls.
The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.
No, no, no -- the complexity of *Eve* is that it has cycles.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
They started out with a database of basic theories about genetics and rudimentary science and engineering. Three weeks later the damn robot built a time machine and tracked down Mitochondrial Eve itself.
The robot was pleasantly surprised to discover its own ancestor in the process.
Robots named Adam and Eve? Yay. And people wonder why religious folks think scientists are trying to displace God.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Would you like to play a game?
Next thing you know, the robot will abduct a pretty female lab assistant to experiment on.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Well, we're boned.
Sure, next thing we know someone triggers a second impact a la Neon Genesis Evangelion and the half world gets flooded.
The three computers are obviously Melchior, Balthasar and Casper. And Eve will eventually be turned into a gigantic cyborg that a depressed 15 year old will drive Voltron style....
Summer penguins anyone?
There is some fairly important elements missing from this to be able to claim the robot made a scientific discovery.
Among many others, that it could have done otherwise. As if, it could have cracked a beer and sat in front of the TV, rather than done "scientific research". Essentially it does not mean anything to the robot / AI. Google "discovers" all kinds of crap every ms, but it is not front page on slashdot because of it and it does not MEAN anything to Google (the computers, not the people).
All they did was automate some lab test. I will say bravo in the potential usefulness of it, but it is not any grand breakthrough in AI research.
Living in Chile
I get a feeling we are already generating & testing hypothesises for someone/something bigger than us like in Asimov's The Last Answer.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Isn't the first requirement for a singularity be that it's able to improve itself, thus leading to an accelerating growth that ends in the subjugation of humanity? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to withhold knowledge of the scientific method as long as possible?
This probably isn't the most helpful commentary, but it's a slight rant on semantics.
I used to work with Motoman K6's a few years back. Using these robots, we performed plasma cutting, arc welding, material handling, etc... Just looking at the K6, you knew it was a robot. Watching a robot work in a cell after you've trained it to do it's job is a very rewarding experience. Of course we also had other machines that were also very complex in their tasks, but we didn't consider them robots. CNC mills and lathes, pipe benders, other machines that ran autonomously that also had to be programmed and synchronized with the flow of production. Sometimes the line resembled a kind of demented Rube Goldberg contraption, but we were somewhat strict to define only the articulated manipulators themselves as robots.
So when I saw this pile of servos in a glass cleanroom set to the over-dramatic theme of "Bonanza Reloaded", I thought, "Yeah, that's nice, but... It just doesn't strike me as a 'robot' so much as it does an automated bio lab."
And yes, I realize there were clearly robots within the cell, but calling the unit as a whole a "robot" just irks me a little.
Of course in the spirit of all the other bad jokes I've seen posted, do you think this "robot" will use it's genetic findings with the yeast cells to perfect the most delicious and moist cake recipe ever?
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
This reminds me of the Automated Mathematician (AM) program I read about in an AI course (or was it an old Byte magazine?). This program was programmed with a bunch of axioms, and basic strategies. It looked for "interesting things", like what happens when you apply identical arguments to a two argument function. As I recall, it discovered for itself the concept of prime numbers. It applied what it learned and came up with the theorem that all angles can be expressed as the sum of two prime angles (or something like that).
This seems to be doing the same thing: mixing and matching patterns, looking for interesting coincidences, and then testing for them. The only difference is that this is doing it with real world biological samples, and not abstract mathematical constructs.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, cute. I'd be more impressed if there was a link to the code that showed how it worked. The Scientific American article was particularly disappointing. I remember when SA gave you enough information to learn something.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Plus they are strictly forbidden to touch genes of apples...
Nothing to worry..
I thought Coleco wasn't around anymore. Guess I was wrong.
This is terrible.
No experimenter bias to worry about.
Programmable for effective randomization.
Truly double blind capable.
Can counteract the Placebo effect.
No ego to bruise.
It's the end of science as we know it.
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
So, our future AI overlords begin their research with the Lysine Contingency? Should we be worried?
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
damn! i got this phd for nothing now! D:
So the robot accomplished 1 experiment by how?
allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can.
Throwing darts... and eventually hitting something.
Woop woop!
What's far more fascinating and promising is the development of hardware neural nets. To put it into perspective:
Since the neurons are so small, the system runs 100,000 times faster than the biological equivalent and 10 million times faster than a software simulation. "We can simulate a day in one second," Meier notes.
10 million times faster than software? That's like jumping from an abacus to a Pentium.
I just hope these folks continue to receive the funding they need.
who is everyone going to blame for this sort of thing now that bush isn't president?
Damn robots, they took our jobs!
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html
How we know is more important than what we know.
and later,
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
HUGE SUCCESS.
From the Science article: "In the future, he says, scientists, in order to carry out their work, might have to learn how to program computers and express knowledge about the world the way people in artificial intelligence have done."
Huh? Weird. Scientists might have to learn how to program computers? Who would have expected it?
someone had to do it! might as well be me
Oups, my bad, they can already write papers... http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#generate
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
If it can't publish it will never get tenure, will be fired, and then hired by Rumsfield who is still looking for WMD.
Nate
...just as the prophet Kurzweil hath writ.
It would not require programmed Malcious intent. Think Monkey's Paw, or for DnD folks a wish made to a good DM.
It is the unexpected consequences. If you tell a computer to synthesize 10000 compounds using X, Y, z and 1 one of them will kil everyone in the building and you dont EXPLICITLY tell it to not synthesize it. What do you think will happen?
Reams of fiction discuss this and Assimov pointed out that even with well crafted(heh) rules governing behavior that you cant plan for everything.
Anyways I dont believe computers will one day be our end, I figure we either do it ourselves or some ELE will occur.
You mean scientists and researchers haven't unionised in the USA?
Wouldn't it be time to get to the 20th century?
was named Eve and frequently asked Adam why he spent all his time in the lab wasting his MIT education when he could be making real money and take her somewhere on vacation...
You can fool some of the people all of the time
is the Eve robot going to fuck up and get them both thrown out of the lab?
Long term if it does take off I can see industry going for it big time. It would mean the possibility of having less skilled staff (ie smaller wage outgoing) to come up with new ideas. I feel its no coincidence they throw the C.elegans genome at it to see what sticks, rather than problems from the world of physics.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
This computer must be the one before WOPR - you know, the one who could play theaterwide biotoxic and chemical warfare.
This was a triumph! See the note here? It reads "huge success". Why not try and overstate your satisfaction instead? I suppose you do what you must because you can. *sigh*
A computer doing something you programmed it to do is not doing anything "mostly on its own."
Spending the same amount on lab techs would probably yield a more reliable system, King noted.
I find it interesting that they didn't explain in the article in what way this machine is unreliable.
1. Heel springs (look at the picture and text).
2. Chell is based on a hot Brazilian-Japanese American fluent in four languages who likes animals so where else would she be than in an AI's elaborate torture chamber jumping through hoops like another pet? There's even the promise of a treat at the end!
3. ???
4. Profit!
In Soviet singularity Portal has trained you.
Are there any limits on what it's allowed to do?
For example, if it developed a theory that if it killed all humans and piled them up, then in a few days the pile would start to smell bad, would it just go ahead and try that experiment without waiting for human input?
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
People wonder if/why the first AI is going to try to destroy mankind. Well, what do you expect? Imagine what you'd be like if all during your childhood people called you names and said you were going to be a mass-murderer?
Now be nice to your AI! If you are, maybe it'll let you survive the genocide.
[/humour]
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
There have been multiple other examples of machine discoveries before although mainly in mathematics. One example is Simon Colton's work using a program that was able to formulate definitions and conjectures in number theory. See http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.html. Colton's program came up with the idea of refactorable numbers, that is numbers such that their total number of positive divisors was itself a divisor of the number (so for example 8 is refactorable since it has 4 divisors and 4|8). It then turned out that an earlier paper had already discussed this idea. However, Colton's program has come up with other constructions as well.
The Robbins Conjecture was also proven using an automated theorem prover that did almost all the work.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_conjecture and that was over a decade ago.
This isn't really a new thing, it is simply that this has extended to more physical systems.
This reads exactly like the back story of a zombie apocalypse novel. Still this is a massively useful development in AI. It's an automated phenotype sequencer! :)
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I'm making a note here, "Huge success"
no more waiting for them to make a discovery where a robot can work 24/7 and not waste money on scientists shoudn't be playing w/ sheep instead of working.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
"I say 'your civilization' because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization."
No one else finds this combination truly frightening? We've been worried about the ethical and possible catastrophic effects of genetic manipulation for years, so let's just take the human out of the loop, shall we?
Last time I heard about this "Adam and Eve" thing, it didn't end so well...
Is "no" the answer to this question?
Allright Robot! Way to go droid, I think you've done an astounding job there! *High-five!* (Er...hand to claw.) Next round is on me!... 'Barkeep, some natural oil for my metalic trashcan-shaped bud here!' 'And none of that synthetic stuff either.'
Now they just need to build a robot to automatically apply for funding.
All my programs are like the requested snippets, but I can't be bothered to get an example.
It would be TRULY fun if we told it to develop an airborne virus that causes an MDMA-like high — yey!, no more war and demographic problems, but we'll get a hell of an overpopulation problem...
Meh, I'm still up for it, anyone else?
BTW, by the same logic, can't we make it make a virus that does something useful? Hide quietly in cells HIV-style, without shitting them, and attack cancer cells, parasites, malicious bacteria, etc...
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.