The 2006 Machine Intelligence Award, sponsored by Electrolux, was awarded to ‘Adam - the Robot Scientist’
“Adam”, The Robot Scientist, developed by Emma Byrne and the team at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, can reason about experiments and experimental results on the function of genes in yeast. Adam’s machine intelligence allows Adam to carefully choose useful experiments to determine these functions. There are potentially 10 to the power of 13 experiments for each of the 6000 or so genes in yeast, but careful selection of the most useful experiments can reduce this number to a mere handful. Without Adam, it would take longer than the existence of the universe to carry out all of these experiments. Emma hopes that future developments in the automation of scientific experimentation can assist in the discovery of useful new human medicines. This groundbreaking work is not yet carried out anywhere else in the world.
Further information on the 2006 competition, including details of other entries, can be found at http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/chrisn/micomp/2006.html
