...two years ago, Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt announced the first stirrings of robotic thinking. Lipson, a computer science professor at Cornell, and Schmidt, then a graduate student in Lipson’s lab, created a computer program that, given a raft of data from physical systems, can describe the natural laws that apply to that system. When they fed their software the motion-capture coordinates of a swinging double pendulum, the machine pondered the data for a couple days, then spat out the Hamiltonian equation describing the motion of such a system—an equation that represents the physical law known as conservation of energy. Their software needed no prior knowledge to discover this law. It wasn’t familiar with gravity, energy, geometry, or anything else. It simply did what human scientists have done since the time of Newton. It looked at the world, came up with theories about how it works, tested them, and then produced a law.

Lipson and Schmidt called their program Eureqa, and they made it available for free on the Web. It has since yielded several new discoveries in a range of fields, discovering scientific laws that we’d never known. Lipson and Schmidt recently worked with Gurol Suel, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, to look at the dynamics of a bacterium cell. Given data about several different biological functions within the cell, the computer did something mind-blowing. “We found this really beautiful, elegant equation that described how the cell worked, and that tended to hold true over all of our new experiments,” Schmidt says. There was only one problem: The humans had no idea why the equation worked, or what underlying scientific principle it suggested. It was, Schmidt says, as if they’d consulted an oracle.

And now I wait for an inevitable counterpoint.

Why do all my N&D threads end up this way?

because you have people like thodoks

oh, i'm not a person...i'm a lolbot

I don't think a robot can score a flag football touchdown for me either.

because you have people like thodoks

Are you always this sarcastic in person? I mean, I'm sarcastic too, but i'd imagine there are plenty of folks at a bar who want to crack a glass over your head.

Are you always this sarcastic in person? I mean, I'm sarcastic too, but i'd imagine there are plenty of folks at a bar who want to crack a glass over your head.



No, Lenny, only I can do that. Tomorrow. 9am.

depends on the company, yaknow?

If true, I know a fella like you. Every time we go to a bar and we're with good people (or bad, doesn't matter), he starts getting sour with folks after a few drinks. Of course I have to be the mediator. I'm like Matt Damon and he's Ed Norton in Rounders

I double dog dare robots to steal my HR career.