Robotic System Performs Massively Parallel Experiments
Kevin Kelly's article "Speculations on the Future of Science" contains the following section:
Combinatorial Sweep Exploration – Much of the unknown can be explored by systematically creating random varieties of it at a large scale. You can explore the composition of ceramics (or thin films, or rare-earth conductors) by creating all possible types of ceramic (or thin films, or rare-earth conductors), and then testing them in their millions. You can explore certain realms of proteins by generating all possible variations of that type of protein and they seeing if they bind to a desired disease-specific site. You can discover new algorithms by automatically generating all possible programs and then running them against the desired problem. Indeed all possible Xs of almost any sort can be summoned and examined as a way to study X. None of this combinatorial exploration was even thinkable before robotics and computers; now both of these technologies permit this brute force style of science. The parameters of the emergent "library" of possibilities yielded by the sweep become the experiment. With sufficient computational power, together with a pool of proper primitive parts, vast territories unknown to science can be probed in this manner.
I bring it up to point out that now, it is well underway.
Comments
atropis on Apr. 27, 2009 4:16 PM
nifty. sounds like we're well on our way to locating the exact specifications of plato's various ideals.
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