[Hplusroadmap] [OWW-Discuss] Tapping into open source / open access and doingslightly more

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 16 May 2008, Antoon Goderis <goderisa at cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> Crossing over to robotics is an interesting add to the mix and has
> been looked at in our world for auto-generating new experiments.
>
> http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/

"The Robot Scientist makes use of an iterative approach to 
experimentation, where knowledge aquired from a previous iteration is 
used to guide the next experimentation step. This is a process known as 
Active Learning, where the learner can plan its own agenda, i.e. decide 
how best to improve its knowledge base and how to go about acquiring 
this information. The Robot Scientist uses the laboratory robot to 
execute the experiment(s) selected as most informative; has a plate 
reader to analyse the experiments, generating data corresponding to the 
scientific observations; uses abductive logic programming to generate 
valid hypotheses that explain the observations; and uses these 
hypotheses to determine the next most informative experiment. At the 
beginning of any investigation, the Robot Scientist has not discovered 
any information, therefore all possible hypotheses are equally valid. 
As the directed discovery process continues, each new observation (or 
experiment/interpretation cycle) will invalidate some of the 
hypotheses, thereby excluding incorrect discoveries. The experiment 
selection process aims to choose the experiment most likely to refute 
the most hypotheses. This iterative process allows irrelevant 
experiments to be avoided, potentially saving both laboratory time and 
the cost of using unnecessary reagents and biological materials."

Yep, it's about time too. Another idea to throw into this is the idea of 
doing in vitro evolution of interesting emergent systems, and then 
taking those back under the robot and having them figure out what was 
evolved in the directed evolution experiment, and since there's an 
equivalency between DNA, GRNs and software, just convert it to software 
and use *that* as a new principle in guiding the recursions.

> I've not run into the heterogeneous mechanical arm problem.. but I
> imagine the same representation formalisms are applicable for
> modeling the functionality of computational jobs, be they Semantic
> Webby or your own.

It is my understanding that we have a hard time representing 
*functionality* in any formal way, other than sending the program 
itself. Think about Google Code Search, or the apt-get interface. You 
can only search for tags, not functionality. If you wanted to search 
for functionality, you'd have to write the code. Oh, and I guess you're 
done then. :)

- Bryan
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