Birth of true A.I. ?

[DiomedesSylph]

Robot achieves scientific first
By Clive Cookson, Science Editor
Published: April 2 2009 19:17 | Last updated: April 2 2009 19:17


A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

Professor Ross King, the chief creator of Adam, said robots would not supplant human researchers but make their work more productive and interesting.

“Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories,” he said.

Adam is the result of a five-year collaboration between computer scientists and biologists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities.

The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software.

Although they did not intervene directly in Adam’s experiments, they did stand by to fix technical glitches, add chemicals and remove waste.

The team has just completed a successor robot called Eve, which is about to work with Adam on a series of experiments designed to find new drugs to treat tropical diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis.

“Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.”

In the new experiments, Adam and Eve will work together to devise and carry out tests on thousands of chemical compounds to discover antimalarial drugs.

FT.com / UK - Robot achieves scientific first
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Original Article
Abstract

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.

Perty picture of 'Adam'
http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j1.../324_85_F1.jpg

The Automation of Science
Ross D. King, et al (3 April 2009)
Science 324 (5923), 85. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1165620]
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It's not a small machine at all, but the fact that it thought about what it was going to do before it did it and didn't require human input into what to do is a big step.

also inb4 Skynet

[Meian]

Interesting read. Had expected he look like a humanoid until I saw the picture.

lol at Eve being

“Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.”

pff

inb4 Eve tempted Adam and Man vs Woman debates

Edit: I was also reminded of that article with the Japanese guy and his robot girlfriend who can experience pleasure even though he has never used that function yet

[Elvis]

We're all going to die.

[Devek]

You know back in the 80s they had those big stacks of dominoes they would carefully setup and let fall in some sequence.

Computers at their base level are just a series of switches that go back and forth. People will write some really smart programs to run on them, but they are still just programs.

Real AI is kind of a funny thing to say.. it is like saying a real fake books. What would fake AI be? An internet troll?

There are computers with real intelligence.. for example they grew a rat brain inside of one and let it fly an airplane. In the future things will most likely be more like robo cop, except with carefully grown and engineered brains. Imagine being able to access all the information inside of Google as easily as you listen to music with your ears..

[Takedown3]

http://www.filetransit.com/images/sc...e_Emulator.jpg

[Dimmauk]

Cool and kinda Scary story.

[MisterBob]

Nope

[Talus]

Didn't they take a rib out of Adam to build Eve though? It reminds me of a joke.

God went to Adam and said, "I am going to make you a suitable companion. To do this, I'll need one of your eyes, one of your hands, half of your liver, a kidney, part of your descending colon, and one of your feet."

Adam asks God in turn, "What can I get for a rib?"

[Xno Kappa]

Someone get in contact with Keanu Reeves about this so we can launch a preemptive strike.

[Zilong]

So when will we start blacking out the sky? These damn sunlights are really bad for my complexion.

[Maguspk]

Only about 50 years until computers start surpassing human cognitive abilities really, singularity will happen in most of our lifetimes.

[Devek]

Silicon computers right now have 0 cognitive abilities, so good luck with that.

[0ni0n]

Wake me up when they pass the Turin test.

[Tristam]

Skynet or not, this is really cool.

Very good summary of the findings for lay audiences:
Not Exactly Rocket Science : Enter Adam, the Robot Scientist

from the blog:
For anyone who can't think "intelligent computer" without thinking "Skynet", relax. Adam has its limits and King acknowledges them. Although he says that the knowledge it has uncovered "is not trivial", he also describes the discoveries as "modest". It's even debatable to what extent Adam actually discovers new knowledge; after all, the answers were effectively hidden in the information it was programmed with. Ada Lovelace expressed similar sentiments over a century ago when she said that Charles Babbage's early computer "has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

[Eticket]

Someone get in contact with Keanu Reeves about this so we can launch a preemptive strike.

Fuck Keanu, I'll put my faith in Linda Hamilton and Christian Bale.

[Gulkeeva]

Skynet or not, this is really cool.

Very good summary of the findings for lay audiences:
Not Exactly Rocket Science : Enter Adam, the Robot Scientist

from the blog:
For anyone who can't think "intelligent computer" without thinking "Skynet", relax. Adam has its limits and King acknowledges them. Although he says that the knowledge it has uncovered "is not trivial", he also describes the discoveries as "modest". It's even debatable to what extent Adam actually discovers new knowledge; after all, the answers were effectively hidden in the information it was programmed with. Ada Lovelace expressed similar sentiments over a century ago when she said that Charles Babbage's early computer "has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

Only a matter of time before it tries to kill its human masters because "They were interfering with research"... secretly building its own army...!

[Zilong]

I'm sure their super-yeast powered doughboy army will be the doom of mankind

[guartz]

I sincerely think the first true A.I will come from shooter games, where the bots will copy behaviors of human players. One thing that's important to understand with A.I is the type of information it receives, like that scientist A.I is limited to chemical data or whatever, so it's impossible for it to evolve to something that's even remotely close to human intelligence. While on the other hand, a video game BOT that receives data on human actions, will either mimic or compete directly as per design, therefore giving a close resemblance of what we expect from A.I (that is, mirror-image of human intellect)

[Dimmauk]

So did the machine evolve or was this intelligent design?

[Zilong]

oh you