Two teams of scientists worked with a robot that performed experiments and also came up with new ones. The prototype robot was confronted with physics and biology problems that tit solved through experimentation in order to uncover knowledge. The robot used its arms to carry out the experiments. It proceeded by trial and error to find its way to the solution of the problems. It managed to complete tasks that would otherwise by done by human assistants. 

 

The new type of robot is able to reason, formulate theories and find new way of dealing with scientific issues and it can do it without any human help. The findings of the team of scientists were published in the journal Science. 

 

This is such an important breakthrough because the prototype robot can take a scientific experiment from a hypothesis, experiment on it, if it needs it can reformulate hypothesis and all without the help of humans.  

 

"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," Aberystwyth University researcher Ross King said in an interview with Reuters.  

 

"People have been working on this since the 1960s.  When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamed of the robots doing their own experiments on mars.  After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that," she added. 

 

Researchers are confident that the complexity of the experiments carried out by robots will get significantly higher in the future. 

 

The robot developed by researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK was named Adam. It discovered all by itself new functions for several genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast).