Along with some guys from Cornell
...At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker's yeast.
"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview.
"People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."
(....)
Just by crunching the numbers -- and without any prior instruction in physics -- the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton's laws of motion and other properties.
Lipson does not think robots will make scientists obsolete any day soon, but believes they could take over much of the routine work in research laboratories.
"One of the biggest problems in science today is finding the underlying principles in areas where there are lots and lots of data," he told reporters in a conference call. "This can help in accelerating the rate at which we can discover scientific principles behind the data."
― kingfish, Thursday, 2 April 2009 22:14 (fifteen years ago) link
Wish they'd shown a pic of the actual robot, rather than video of completely unrelated creepy pseudohuman robots.
― James Morrison, Thursday, 2 April 2009 22:18 (fifteen years ago) link