Robotic Scientist wins AI awards

'Adam the Robot Scientist' developed by Emma Byrne and team at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, recently won the Electrolux-sponsored Artificial Intelligence Awards.

The robot can reason about experiments and experimental results on the function of genes in yeast. Adam's machine intelligence allows it to carefully choose useful experiments to determine these functions.

There are potentially 10 to the power of 13 experiments for each of the 6000 or so genes in yeast, but careful selection of the most useful experiments can reduce this number to a mere handful. Without Adam, the team says, it would take longer than the existence of the universe to carry out all of these experiments. Byrne hopes that future developments in the automation of scientific experimentation can assist in the discovery of useful new human medicines.

Developer Byrne said: 'Adam's intelligence allows him to choose and automatically carry out experiments, removing much of the routine drudge from scientific discovery. Adam is capable of constructing 1,000 experiments a day so he has the potential to identify the function of many genes at a time. I hope the intelligence used by Adam will help other scientists to focus more on scientific discovery than on routine laboratory work".