Even with unparalleled genius at his disposal, it took Sir Isaac Newton years of painstaking observation and deep cogitation to formulate his laws of nature.
Even with unparalleled genius at his disposal, it took Sir Isaac Newton years of painstaking observation and deep cogitation to formulate his laws of nature. But now there’s a computer in the US that can do Newton’s work in a matter of minutes. And across the Atlantic in Britain is a robot, Adam, that can — without help — formulate a hypothesis, devise and conduct an experiment, and interpreting the results discover new scientific knowledge.
In breakthrough research, a Cornell University scientist and his student have tested an algorithm that recognises underlying patterns in a jumble of data and comes up with physical laws. For example, the algorithm — fed into a computer by means of a program — can observe through a motion sensor a rogue trader jump off the roof of the BSE building at Dalal Street and come up with the equations for a body under free fall without prior knowledge of physics.
For matters of practicality, Hod Lipson, a computer science professor at Cornell, and Michael Schmidt, a graduate student, tested the method on oscillators and pendulums. They fed the computer with motion-capture data — the sort one sees explained in documentaries about movie special effects — on the positions and velocities of several points of the objects over a period of time. The computer was able to find out laws, like the law of conservation of momentum, governing processes involving the objects.
The results were reported on Friday in the journal Science, which also reported on Adam the robot, created by scientists at Aberystwyth University, Wales, and Cambridge University, England.
About his computer, Lipson said in the Science article, “If you just look at the data plainly, it’s difficult to see if there’s anything systematic going on there. But despite that fact, when the algorithm analysed that data, it could see laws that we know are correct.”
The British robot was tasked with studying the genomics of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a baker’s yeast which scientists use to model more complex life forms. The researchers conducted independent experiments that verified the robot’s findings. Thanks to its artificial intelligence, lead researcher Ross King of Aberystwyth said in the journal, Adam has discovered new scientific knowledge without human intervention.
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