The sober, respectable Financial Times isn’t really the publication one would expect to be covering OH EM GEE THE ROBOT THINKS IT THINKS! kind of breakthroughs, but that’s more or less what it’s just done, reporting on a laboratory robot named Adam that has just formed a hypothesis, devised a method to test it and then executed it without any human help:
Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.
The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.
…
The team has just completed a successor robot called Eve, which is about to work with Adam on a series of experiments designed to find new drugs to treat tropical diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis.
In the lab, according to research leader Ross King, the humans functioned more or less as custodians and janitors – they made sure Adam didn’t break down, and they “removed chemical waste.”
You can discover more about Adam and Eve at Aberystwyth’s Robot Scientist page, which has pictures and video of the robots at work.
