Robo-researcher

Though robots have been essential pieces of research equipment for years, they've mostly handled repetitive, simple tasks that required little thought. Now robots are coming into their own as scientists, forming hypotheses and designing experiments to test them.Ross King, a computer scientist at Aberystwyth University, in England, and colleagues at Cambridge University have spent the last ten years trying to make robots that can pore over data, form hypotheses, and test them out. Recently, their all-in-one scientist, dubbed Adam, has actually been able to make new discoveries by pinpointing the genes that encode orphan enzymes in yeast. The researchers report the findings in this week's Science. Adam ran a customized computer program scanning the yeast genome and learning models of yeast metabolism. The robot then sifted through all this data and used a mash of bioinformatic software to form hypotheses, while other software developed experimental protocols. Adam formed deletion mutant yeasts and systematically tested the effects of adding different chemicals to their growth medium. Then, like countless graduate students before him, the robot conducted hours of tedious, painstaking experiments and analyzed the results. The robot's analysis determined which genes coded for several metabolic enzymes--connections that had never been identified before.

Adam at work
Video courtesy: FFAB:UK For King, the desire to build a robot scientist is part pragmatic, part philosophical. On one hand, a lot of scientific questions have "thousands and thousands of components, so it's very hard to imagine if you could ever see what they're all doing and model them without robotic help," he says. But it also gets to deeper questions about the nature of science. If you can train a computer to "think" scientifically, then that "will tell you what science is: you really understand it if you can get a system to emulate it," he says. Bruce Buchanan, an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who helped build some of the first Mars-bound robots to analyze space rocks, says King's ability to get "a robot to think intelligently about science," is impressive. But King was not the first person to dream of "intelligent assistants" who might take the hypothesis-formulating, titrating, and pipetting out of human hands, he says. "Pieces of the puzzle have been in place for some years," he says.Though the research Adam has conducted thus far is fairly humdrum, the goal is to eventually build robots that think even more creatively about science. "I think there's a continuum in scientific research from really basic stuff, which Adam has done, to [science done] by the likes of Einstein and Newton," King says. (Most human scientists are somewhere in the middle, he adds.) "I don't see why it's not possible to make more and more sophisticated systems that get better and better at science." But making a silicon-based Einstein doesn't automatically imply that lowly human scientists will become obsolete, Buchanan says. Instead, he imagines a world where human and robot researchers work hand-in-hand, just "two scientists collaborating, neither of whom knows everything, but together they complement one another." King's team is currently working on another robot, called Eve, which will conduct drug screening research.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl: A robot with a real brain;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54929/
[14th August 2008]*linkurl:A robot code of ethics;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53121/
[1st May 2007]*linkurl:Make way for the robot scientist;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14494/
[1st March 2004]

Robo-researcher

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