Robot discovers new scientific knowledge after designing, doing own experiments

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This article was published 02/04/2009 (6201 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO – Physically, it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the classical image of a robot, but a computerized researcher that performs its own experiments could end up pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery.

Given the moniker Adam, the robotic scientist is believed by its creators to be the first machine to independently uncover new scientific knowledge.

Scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and Cambridge University in England have spent 10 years designing Adam, which decides what experiments it wants to do and performs all the steps to complete the scientific process.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the team reports on how the robot was programmed to conduct experiments in the hope of expanding knowledge about the genetic makeup of baker’s yeast. The organism – the same one used to make beer, wine and bread – is used by scientists to model more complex life systems.

Ross King, professor of computer science at the Welsh university and lead researcher, said the team demonstrated about five years ago that its robot scientist could think up its own hypotheses, devise and carry out experiments, and look at the results.

“But what we didn’t know then was that we could get such a system to discover any new scientific knowledge,” King said Thursday from Aberystwyth, explaining that the researchers spent the last five years improving Adam’s reasoning ability.

“So now it’s been able to uncover some new scientific knowledge.”

Adam, which combines robotics with artificial intelligence, came up with 12 hypotheses about the unknown functions of certain genes in yeast, carried out its experiments and analyzed the data.

King said the researchers manually tested three of them and found that the robot’s findings were both previously unknown in the scientific literature and correct.

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

But don’t picture human-like machines such as those in the film “I, Robot” interacting side-by side over Petri dishes and microscopes with their living counterparts.

The Adam prototype is a sophisticated conglomeration of components that is about the size of a small room. “It’s a complicated beast,” said King. “It’s called a laboratory robot as opposed to one that wanders about the lab doing things.”

It’s unclear how useful such robots would be, said William Melek, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ontario’s University of Waterloo who is involved in robotic design.

While the U.K. researchers were clever in combining artificial intelligence with robotics and automation to increase efficiency and reduce human labour, Melek said Adam’s utility is limited.

Should a researcher want to study a different type of organism, the automated robotic set-up could be reused, he said. But to have the artificial intelligence component generate and conduct experiments would require input of expert knowledge by human scientists – a time-consuming and tedious undertaking, Melek added.

“You’d have to customize it every time.”

In a perspective article accompanying the Science paper, computer scientists David Waltz of Columbia University and Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh say robots like Adam can be viewed as computerized lab assistants that are much needed to deal with the mass of data inherent in research.

“For the foreseeable future, the prospect of using automated systems as assistants holds vast promise as these assistants are becoming not only faster but much broader in their capabilities – more knowledgeable, more creative, and more self-reflective,” they write.

“Human-machine partnering systems that match the tasks to what each partner does best can potentially increase the rate of scientific progress dramatically, in the process revolutionizing the practice of science and changing what scientists need to know.”

King foresees that robots in the future would be more general purpose than Adam, “so that you can change what type of experiment you’re doing just by changing the software, rather than changing the hardware.”

The researchers are interested in having Adam do experiments on a worm called C. elegans, a model often used by researchers to study multicellular animals.

And, of course, what would Adam be without a mate. King’s team is working on a robotic Eve, which the researchers plan to use for testing potential drugs to treat such killer diseases as malaria.