
'Eureka machine' works out laws of nature - echair
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/eureka-laws-nature-artificial-intelligence-ai
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ovi256
I can see how a machine like this can help in situations where we have lots of
data and plenty of alternative hypotheses to test, like for example the work
the Adam robot is doing in molecular biology and genomics : it sifts through
dozens of known genes to find the one that is responsible for a certain
enzyme. This is very keen to a large search in a huge search-space. However,
it still needs fitness criteria to be defined by humans - in Adam's case, how
does it know the gene is responsible for the enzyme ? The experiment to assert
that was designed by humans.

Furthermore, there are sciences like neurobiology where we have lots of
disparate data and due to increasing sensor resolution, we are getting reams
more. What is needed are theories to explain it, and thus shed lights on the
underlying mechanisms. This kind of unifying theory is much more complex than
newtonian mechanics - with no offense, I hope, to the great Sir Isaac Newton.

Furthermore, the Eureka machine was already studying the right experimet which
generated the right data - from which Newton's laws were obvious. Sir Isaac
Newton had to decide, among many other things, which was the right phenomenon
to consider, and from which angle - and all this against huge cultural biases
against "simplistic" and "mechanical" laws that might restrain God's power.

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sh1mmer
It's very interesting, but I dislike how the article refers to a "thinking
machine". The computer is finding a best match algorithm from a search space
in an experiment designed by people.

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paraschopra
"When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls,
the machine would be able to work out the equation."

Isn't it plain regression or other prediction tasks. More important that
finding out relations is the ability to look at the right places for data. If
you feed data to any prediction algorithm (ANN, GP, Regression, etc.), it is
sure to come up with an equation.

