For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input.Scientists designed “Adam” to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.”It’s a major advance,” says David Waltz of the Center forComputational Learning Systems at Columbia University. “Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence.It’s automating a part of the scientific process that hasn’t been automated in the past.”The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground.Researchers have been automating portions of the scientific process for decades, using robotic laboratory instruments to screen for drugs and sequence genomes, but humans are usually responsible for forming the hypotheses and designing the experiments themselves. After the experiments are complete, the humans must exert themselves again to draw conclusions.
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