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Robot Makes Scientific Discovery (Mostly) On Its Own

Posted by timothy on Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:40 PM
from the if-you-consider-that-on-its-own dept.
Robotics Biotech Science
Hugh Pickens writes "A science-savvy robot called Adam has successfully developed and tested its first scientific hypothesis, discovering that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes which encourage biochemical reactions in yeast, then ran an experiment with its lab hardware to test its predictions, and analyzed the results, all without human intervention. Adam was equipped with a database on genes that are known to be present in bacteria, mice and people, so it knew roughly where it should search in the genetic material for the lysine gene in baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ross King, a computer scientist and biologist at Aberystwyth University, first created a computer that could generate hypotheses and perform experiments five years ago. 'This is one of the first systems to get [artificial intelligence] to try and control laboratory automation,' King says. '[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.' Adam has cost roughly $1 million to develop and the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can. King's group has also created another robot scientist called Eve dedicated to screening chemical compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that could combat diseases such as malaria.
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Submission: Robot Makes Scientific Discovery on its Own by pickens (49171)
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  • Please, fellow slashdotters... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toonol (1057698) on Thursday April 02 2009, @10:42PM (#27440693)
    If I ever do cutting edge research on robot AI, please punch me if I try to name my new robots "Adam" or "Eve".

  • Call me when (Score:5, Funny)

    by Culture20 (968837) on Thursday April 02 2009, @10:46PM (#27440713)
    ... it starts experimenting with inter-dimensional portal guns.

  • Time for... (Score:3, Funny)

    by oldhack (1037484) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:06PM (#27440823)

    the union of scientists. You thought Teamsters were nasty? You ain't seen jack squat. WE SPLICE GENES!!! WE SPLIT ATOMS!!! WE (probably) MAKE BLACKHOLES!!!

    Ross King, gutless traitor, you and your tin cans, your names will live in infamy.

  • But... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tsotha (720379) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:07PM (#27440827)
    Oh, sure, it's neat-o. But you could probably afford hundreds of grad students to do the work for the same price.

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)

      by wizardforce (1005805) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:15PM (#27440871) Journal

      You joke but really undergrads are cheaper than graduate students... At least from my experience working in a biology lab in college. It was/is common practice to recruit undergrads to do free work for the labs. The undergrad gets some experience in the field and the lab gets free labor in exchange for dealing with the inexperience of the average undergrad.

      • Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Saysys (976276) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:20PM (#27440911)
        "in exchange for dealing with the inexperience of the average undergrad."

        THAT Sr. is an expensive proposition.

      • Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:22PM (#27440927)

        That's nothing, you could probably get some hobos to do the work for free and save some money by having them eat the hazardous biological waste rather than disposing of it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Bowling Moses (591924)
          That's not all that funny. I know someone who went on sabbatical to a Chinese university a couple years ago. They're building brand new high-tech bioscience labs but not the necessary infrastructure to support them properly. There were no facilities at that particular university, one of the top ten in China, for handling hazardous waste. Hazardous liquids are just poured down the drain, nothing for disposal was autoclaved. He saw a peasant (his term) poking through the trash and yes, eat the agar out of

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Profane MuthaFucka (574406) <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:23PM (#27440931) Homepage Journal

      Yes, but there are no ethical rules against watching your two lab robots fuck each other.

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:29PM (#27440963) Journal
      In terms of R&D, certainly, the status quo is cheaper. In terms of actually doing the work, though, I wouldn't be so sure. Much of science involves quite repetitive manipulation of samples, numerous instances of the same thing, tweaked variants in parallel, or both. Huge amounts of labor that is reasonably easy to characterize; but needs to be done precisely and without error.

      The case of electronics assembly is arguably analogous. Humans are cheap; but (quite expensive) pick and place machines are ubiquitous. Why? Because they are faster, more precise, and more consistent than humans.

      It is already starting. This piece [wired.com] describes a massive robot setup for processing brain samples(cue: whatcouldpossiblygowrong). In high volume gene sequencing, automated equipment is common enough to essentially be a stock photo cliche by now.

    • Grad students often move on or will eventually die. Sure, they're replaced, but each replacement has to start fresh. With something like Adam, it can continually go back to previous results and not miss a single detail. Future upgrades could give it better analysis methods so it can do better hypotheses, but still retain all previous data.

      Honestly, I'm not aware of the full scope, but for something like this $1MM seems like a bargain.

  • A bit of a stretch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by derGoldstein (1494129) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:12PM (#27440859)
    '[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.'

    I think this is called "flow control". This was invented before electricity. It was around before the term "science" existed.

    So this is the first time it's applied to *this specific* operation. It's been around in robotics ever since there were "robots".

    Here's a good example [wikipedia.org].

  • Eh hehh... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by djupedal (584558) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:16PM (#27440885)

    "...the software that drives Adam's thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can."

    There is no 'thought process'. 1's & 0's...that's it. Anthropomorphising the over priced little key-puncher isn't fooling anyone.

    Give me $1 mil and I'll put a scare into Adam that he won't soon forget. I can read 3k WPM as well as raw postscript, palms, tarot cards and bar codes with the naked eye. I can intuit nearly 30 spoken languages on body english alone and smell phony money at the bottom of a sweaty pocket. I don't need no stink'n badges and I know when to cross to the other side of the street. Adam might get better press, but until it can order at a drive thru and sort used car parts based on cross-over and eBay thru-put, I'm comfortable sleeping in.

    • Your neurons are also working in 1's & 0's. The difference is that our brain can reorganize itself while a computer chip can't adapt its circuits.

  • Personal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mapkinase (958129) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:21PM (#27440913) Homepage Journal

    I knew that Ross was up to something bigger than protein secondary structure prediction when I met him 15 years ago at ICRF. He was a great Prolog fan then. Now he has probably bunch of graduate students coding for him.

  • Gender bender (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr_Icon (124425) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:25PM (#27440941) Homepage

    The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.

    No, no, no -- the complexity of *Eve* is that it has cycles.

  • Bender would say... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eil (82413) on Thursday April 02 2009, @11:44PM (#27441021) Homepage Journal

    Well, we're boned.

  • The first step to a singularity? (Score:4, Funny)

    by moderatorrater (1095745) on Friday April 03 2009, @12:06AM (#27441157)
    Isn't the first requirement for a singularity be that it's able to improve itself, thus leading to an accelerating growth that ends in the subjugation of humanity? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to withhold knowledge of the scientific method as long as possible?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kjella (173770)

      Isn't the first requirement for a singularity be that it's able to improve itself, thus leading to an accelerating growth that ends in the subjugation of humanity?

      We've had that for years with simple statistics keeping, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms and other ways of limited learning. You can have a learning chess computer that'll run circles around me yet it's completely harmless because it's not self-aware - it does not understand what it means to be turned off.

      I'd be much more fascinated by a robot that given access to its own schematics etc. was to implement its own survivability routine like avoiding excess heat, cold, pressure, electrical jolts, wate

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Chris Burke (6130)

        I'd be much more fascinated by a robot that given access to its own schematics etc. was to implement its own survivability routine like avoiding excess heat, cold, pressure, electrical jolts, water damage, corrosion, metal fatigue and so on and found pressing the "off" button as one of the identified threats to its survival. Not self-awareness in a human sense but enough logic to recognize the puppeteer.

        I would like to think that the robot would be rational about it and realize that "Off" was an orderly shu

  • Robot or automated lab? (Score:3, Informative)

    by f2x (1168695) <flush2x.gmail@com> on Friday April 03 2009, @12:09AM (#27441189) Homepage
    This probably isn't the most helpful commentary, but it's a slight rant on semantics.

    I used to work with Motoman K6's a few years back. Using these robots, we performed plasma cutting, arc welding, material handling, etc... Just looking at the K6, you knew it was a robot. Watching a robot work in a cell after you've trained it to do it's job is a very rewarding experience. Of course we also had other machines that were also very complex in their tasks, but we didn't consider them robots. CNC mills and lathes, pipe benders, other machines that ran autonomously that also had to be programmed and synchronized with the flow of production. Sometimes the line resembled a kind of demented Rube Goldberg contraption, but we were somewhat strict to define only the articulated manipulators themselves as robots.

    So when I saw this pile of servos in a glass cleanroom set to the over-dramatic theme of "Bonanza Reloaded", I thought, "Yeah, that's nice, but... It just doesn't strike me as a 'robot' so much as it does an automated bio lab."

    And yes, I realize there were clearly robots within the cell, but calling the unit as a whole a "robot" just irks me a little.

    Of course in the spirit of all the other bad jokes I've seen posted, do you think this "robot" will use it's genetic findings with the yeast cells to perfect the most delicious and moist cake recipe ever?

  • Automated Mathematician (Score:4, Interesting)

    by camperdave (969942) on Friday April 03 2009, @12:38AM (#27441319) Journal
    This reminds me of the Automated Mathematician (AM) program I read about in an AI course (or was it an old Byte magazine?). This program was programmed with a bunch of axioms, and basic strategies. It looked for "interesting things", like what happens when you apply identical arguments to a two argument function. As I recall, it discovered for itself the concept of prime numbers. It applied what it learned and came up with the theorem that all angles can be expressed as the sum of two prime angles (or something like that).

    This seems to be doing the same thing: mixing and matching patterns, looking for interesting coincidences, and then testing for them. The only difference is that this is doing it with real world biological samples, and not abstract mathematical constructs.

  • The end of science (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eskayp (597995) on Friday April 03 2009, @12:58AM (#27441433)

    This is terrible.
    No experimenter bias to worry about.
    Programmable for effective randomization.
    Truly double blind capable.
    Can counteract the Placebo effect.
    No ego to bruise.
    It's the end of science as we know it.

  • Lysine? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anenome (1250374) on Friday April 03 2009, @01:06AM (#27441473) Homepage

    So, our future AI overlords begin their research with the Lysine Contingency? Should we be worried?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by juhaz (110830)

      So, our future AI overlords begin their research with the Lysine Contingency? Should we be worried?

      Of course we should. Next thing you know, they'll be cloning dinosaur shock troops.

  • Software AI == Cold fusion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Henkc (991475) on Friday April 03 2009, @01:29AM (#27441565)
    Academics have been poking away on software AI for decades (also ANN [wikipedia.org]) - I can't help feeling that this is a dead-end in the same way that cold fusion is, even though it's intellectually (hacking) fascinating.

    What's far more fascinating and promising is the development of hardware neural nets [physorg.com]. To put it into perspective:

    Since the neurons are so small, the system runs 100,000 times faster than the biological equivalent and 10 million times faster than a software simulation. "We can simulate a day in one second," Meier notes.

    10 million times faster than software? That's like jumping from an abacus to a Pentium.

    I just hope these folks continue to receive the funding they need.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BikeHelmet (1437881)

      I think this is a more limited type of thought. The scope is limited to thinking about genes, genetic material, and identifying similarities between genetic code from multiple species, then trying experiments before proceeding and trying another experiment.

      Effectively it is guessing, examining the result, comparing it in fancy statistical ways, then making another guess. The end result is it discovers something faster than humans could.

      Now... pair it with object recognition [slashdot.org], and you're one step closer to Sk

        • Then it would conclude that in whatever report it generates after finishing its experiments.

        • Re:Robot discovers Humans "unnecessary"... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by cong06 (1000177) on Friday April 03 2009, @12:01AM (#27441127)

          See, what people fail to see is this requires not only Strong AI but also a programmed Malicious intent.

          People keep assuming that if we build a robot that can emulate some of our thought, it will emulate our motives also

          Since we program it, it will only emulate the motives we give it. Emulating motives that are abstract enough to eventually lead back to our demise are quite complex

          • Re:Robot discovers Humans "unnecessary"... (Score:5, Funny)

            by andy.ruddock (821066) on Friday April 03 2009, @12:19AM (#27441227) Homepage
            We could always build them with OFF switches as well.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Failed Physicist (1411173)

            Not necessarily. The least elegant way to create strong AI is probably to brute force simulate a whole brain down to nearly every neurotransmitter molecule, something which futurists argue will be doable by supercomputers around 2020.
            This is a worst case solution since it would imply that the brain is not understood yet and instead of having a simpler model that can provide the same level of strong AI we just throw raw power at it.
            In this case, the AI would theoritically emerge out of the complexity of the

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jadin (65295)

            I always thought the point of AI was self-learning (and or self-aware). Meaning you can program it to only emulate the motives you want, but what's to stop it from discovering the ones we avoided on it's own?

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by gknoy (899301)

            See, what people fail to see is this requires not only Strong AI but also a programmed Malicious intent.

            I disagree. For an AI to determine that we are suboptimal, and replace/eradicate us, it doesn't need malicious intent, merely a calculation that things would be Better (by whatever metric) without us, and a lack of adequately expressed "don't kill the humans" controls.

            Maliciousness implies wanting to see someone else be harmed. There's a difference between WANTING to harm us and "merely" recognizing tha

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by tnk1 (899206)

          What if it concludes that humans are genetically inefficient and decides to replace them with a specie designed by itself?

          Humans replaced by coins? Now that is a dystopian future that even Philip K. Dick never considered.

          May God have mercy on us.

    • No kidding. Let's get Ron Moore to pilot it and himself into the sun.

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