King et al: The Automation of Science (2009)

Metadata

• Title: The Automation of Science

• Authors: King, R.D. et al

• Publication Year: 2009

• Journal: Science

• Full text available on research gate

Abstract

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist “Adam,” which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam’s conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam’s research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.

Key Quotes

[A robot scientist] is a physically implemented laboratory automation system that exploits techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (7–9) to execute cycles of scientific experimentation. A robot scientist automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments by using laboratory robotics, interprets the results, and then repeats the cycle.