A machine can now do science

Economist.com reports on an article in the January 15 edition of Nature. “The robot scientist developed by Ross King of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and his colleagues, does everything a flesh-and-blood scientist does?or, rather, it does what philosophers of science say that scientists ought to do. That is, it formulates hypotheses from observations, conducts experiments to test them, and then formulates new hypotheses from the results. And worse, from the point of view of the human researcher, it does so as effectively as a person.”