Monday, April 06, 2009
Lipson and Schmidt create "Robotic Scientist", discovers scientific laws

Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson examine the Double Pendulum used in these experiments.

PhD student Michael Schmidt and Professor Hod Lipson have developed a system for teasing out scientific laws, in analytical form, merely by observing experimental systems. Without any prior knowledge about physics, geometry or kinematics, the system discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians and energy and momentum conservation laws by observing systems such as a double pendulum and a spring-mass oscillator. The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html,

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/science/07robot.html?ref=science,

or http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090402/full/news.2009.212.html