The Robotic Scientist: Distilling Natural Laws from Experimental Data, from Cognitive Robotics to Computational Biology

摘要

Can machines discover scientific laws automatically? Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. We will outline a series of recent research projects, starting with self-reflecting robotic systems, and ending with machines that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret the results, to discover new scientific laws. We will then present examples from psychology to cosmology, from classical physics to modern physics, from big science to small science.