A ROBOT that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries, according to its developers.
Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, better known as baker’s yeast.
, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, says that Adam’s achievement is modest, but real. “It’s certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable.”
Adam, which actually consists…
