Artificially intelligent robot scientist makes discovery

Wow, this is awesome.  Some folks in England invented a robot that does science — from hypothesis, to testing, to conclusion — and it actually generated new knowledge autonomously!  Outstanding.

“The scientists at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge designed Adam to carry out each stage of the scientific process automatically without the need for further human intervention. The robot has discovered simple but new scientific knowledge about the genomics of the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism that scientists use to model more complex life systems. The researchers have used separate manual experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct.”

The study will be published in tomorrow’s edition of Science.