Robot Scientist

Robot Scientist (also known as Adam^[5]) is a laboratory robot created and developed by a group of scientists including Ross King, Kenneth Whelan, Ffion Jones, Philip Reiser, Christopher Bryant, Stephen Muggleton, Douglas Kell and Steve Oliver.^{[2][6][7][8][9][10]}

Prototype

As a prototype for a "robot scientist", Adam is able to perform independent experiments to test hypotheses and interpret findings without human guidance, removing some of the drudgery of laboratory experimentation.^[11][12] Adam is capable of:

• hypothesizing to explain observations
• devising experiments to test these hypotheses
• physically running the experiments using laboratory robotics
• interpreting the results from the experiments
• repeating the cycle as required^{[10][13][14][15][16][17]}

While researching yeast-based functional genomics, Adam became the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.^[5][18][19]

Adam and Eve

Adam's research studied baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)^[2] and is one of two robot scientists along with "Eve"^[20][13] (named after Adam and Eve), a robot currently doing research on drug screening.^{[21][22][23][24][25]}

References

Wikinews has related news: Welsh University announces intelligent robot conducting biology experiments