Robotic lab partner independantly "discovers scientific knowledge"
Posted on: April 2, 2009 - 4:53pm
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Robotic lab partner independantly "discovers scientific knowledge"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7979113.stm
By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News
The robot, called Adam, is the first machine to have independently "discovered new scientific knowledge".
It has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and is able to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses.
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Yet another field becomes automated: the lab assistant. lol.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
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My mind is boggling at the amount of knowledge we can gain as this technology gets better. I've got goose-bumps thinking about it!
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Wholeheartedly agreed. I've got too many things that this affects bumping around in my head to be able to name anything specific. It might be more productive to wonder about what fields this won't affect as the technology improves.
If it does what I think it can with sufficient time and improvement, software programmers will cream themselves. No more scanning billions of lines of code for a single faulty keystroke that fucks up the whole program.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
And once again, the mechanical process of science is so easy that a robot can do it. Why, oh why, is this still a mystery to the mystics?
PS - to the human scientists reading this, I'm sure you understand that I don't mean designing experiments, which the robots aren't actually doing as much as seems to be implied.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Right, Will.
This robot didn't invent an experiment. It simply proceeded through an existing heuristic algorythm as applied to a human's experiment. It's just automating a very tedious part of science.
I think I can give some indication of why this technology is important. Consider the recent experiment where a bacteria changed into another bacteria in the lab. It took, what, a decade or so of scientists coming in every day to separate cultures, do this, do that, do the other. I'm not saying this robot could have automated that work, but it's a step in the right direction. Imagine that scientists could perform ten, or a hundred, long-term time consuming experiments at a time instead of devoting themselves to just one. We're talking about an exponential increase in scientific knowledge above and beyond the already exponential growth being acheived by scientists who need to sleep at night.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I agree, I think it's amazing. The best thing about it is that it leaves more scientists more time to write articles or think about studies in broad-stroke terms. They could even assign different robots different "vectors" of hypothesis for the same problem, and given the volume of tests that one robot can do, they'd be able to cover two or three angles of a problem in a few weeks.
It would be interesting to write paper-generation software for those robot's data sets. That is, describing the algorithmic route in English, and giving the data as a processed form. It might require a different format, seeing as robots lack the ability to do introductions and conclusions.
Is deludedgod around? I wonder what his take on that would be. I don't know what other working pure-research scientists we have on here.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Here is a somewhat related new tool.
http://www.physorg.com/news157901184.html
I've always gone on the assumption that deludedgod has google alerts set for his name since he seems to magically appear anytime someone wonders aloud about his opinion. It's almost like the Candyman.
Then again, he reads damn fast, so who knows...
Let's try it...
Deludedgod
Deludedgod
Deludedgod
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Or you could just send him a PM....
*Does just that*
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
You silly rationalists with your... "Proven" methods. I fart in your general direction.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I hadn't clicked on this before because I had already read the article on BBC, thus disproving Hamby's hypothesis. I am here because of Vastet's PM. When I read this I was just dumbstruck that anyone could still continue to bandy about ridiculous claims like that the scientific method is a closed-minded, dogmatic, religious process, or that it is somehow on equal epistemological footing with breathtakingly vapid garbage like religion. What has been done here indicates that the process of scientific investigation is so methodical and rational that we just got a non-conscious entity to test predictions. I was impressed by the accomplishment, and simultaneously facepalming thinking, as Will did, of all the nonsense mystics. This achievement is testament to the overwhelming epistemological superiority of the scientific method.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Damn.
I hate being wrong.
I also forgot the question. Anyway, I hadn't considered that this invention really does offer a pretty open-and-shut case for the scientific method. We ought not have to listen to anymore postmodern twaddle about it being a non-real abstract within the paradigm of human consciousness. We don't even need a mind to do it anymore.
I'm sure we'll still have to listen to postmodern twaddle, though.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I hadn't thought of it that way either. Wow.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Yeah, we will. Because there are enough people out there who are actually into mental backflips to provide pomo papers into eternity. It's a little sad, but then I think that only they have to read those papers, and otherwise, anyone who could come up with such creative nonsense could be a master criminal, such is their obvious hate for humanity.
We might just be avoiding super-criminals by providing a place for them to think themselves into a stupor.
...
Okay, that's how I reconcile pomo with my fragile psyche.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I've had only four uses for postmodernism: grant snatching, turing testing, doing my taxes, and the good ol' days of gen-ed core classes.