A robot scientist that can generate
its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its
first real scientific discoveries, reportsNew Scientist.
Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of
researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of
Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for
a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's
yeast.
Ross King, a computational biologist
at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, said that Adam's results
were modest, but real. "It's certainly a contribution to knowledge.
It would be publishable," he says.
Adam, which actually consists of a small roomful of lab
equipment, has four personal computers that act as a brain, and
possesses robot arms, cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and
other equipment. The team gave the robot a freezer containing a
library of thousands of mutant strains of yeast with individual
genes deleted. It was also equipped with a database containing
information about yeast genes, enzymes, and metabolism, and a
supply of hundreds of metabolites.
To discover which genes coded for which
enzymes, Adam cultured a mutant yeast with a certain gene knocked
out, and monitored how well the mutant grew without a particular
metabolite. If the strain grew poorly without the metabolite, Adam
learned something about the function of the knocked out gene. The
robot could carry out more than 1000 of these experiments a
day.
In all, Adam formulated and tested 20
hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses
were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that
three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing
the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam's work with
their own experiments.
The team is now working on a new robot,
called Eve, which will search for new drugs.
Adam, Eve and their ilk could soon automate
routine and time-consuming scientific chores, leaving human
scientists free to make higher level, creative leaps, says King.
But ultimately the robots may even be capable of conducting truly
independent research, he says.
Will
Bridewell, an artificial intelligence researcher at
Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, says Adam is
operating only at the level of a graduate student. Still, the robot
is moving closer to the goal of an artificially intelligent machine
that can cooperate with other scientists and write up their results
in natural language, he says. "That's probably far off, but it
seems likely that we will get there. This is yet another step on
the way."
In a further step in this direction,
researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have
developed software that can observe physical systems and
independently identify the laws that underlay them.
The software, which was not pre-programmed
with any basic rules of physics or geometry, was shown images of
moving systems such as a double pendulum. It then used an
evolutionary algorithm to generate mathematical equations, and
tested them to see if they accurately described the system it had
observed. For instance, the computer produced an equation that
described conservation of angular momentum.
Journal references:
Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1165893) and
Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1165620)
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