Futurehead.com

Future science historians will mark the beginning of the 21st century as a time when robots took their place beside human scientists.

Programmers have turned computers from extraordinarily powerful but fundamentally dumb tools, into tools with smarts. Artificially intelligent programs make sense of data so complex that it defies human analysis. They even come up with hypotheses, the testable questions that drive science, on their own.

At the University of Cambridge, Ross King’s program “Adam” designs and runs genetics experiments. At Cornell, Hod Lipson’s Eureqa finds equations to fit data, attaining Newton’s insights in a single afternoon. University of Chicago mathematical biologist Andrey Rzhetsky designs programs less glamorous but equally powerful, able to analyze millions of papers at once.

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