The Automation of Science
The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments insufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist “Adam,”which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomicshypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypothesesby using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam’s conclusions through manualexperiments. To describe Adam’s research, we have developed an ontology and logical language.The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelikestructure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logicaldescription. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.
图1. 机器人科学家亚当。
图2. 2A2OA活性的测定结果。
表 1. 孤儿酶和亚当的假设。
图3. 机器科学家研究的结构（一个片段）。