
Last week we saw that robots are taking over the blogosphere. Not only will robots take the roll of writing blogs but it looks as though they will also read and comment on them too. This takes the burden off of us humans to read and write them... so why am I bothering to write this?
Even computer scientists are being replaced by computers that can write publishable research papers on computers. This almost sounds paradoxical. Just don't ask who shaves the computer.

A similar trend is growing in education. Computers are invading classrooms and will most likely replace students in the near future. Many schools now use computer simulations to replace actual physics labs because actual eqipment is costly and dangerous. They generate "empirical" data and perform calculations, leaving students with the only burden of making conclusions. Making conclusions and formulating a theory that encompasses fundamental laws is generally considered a profound human achievement. Certainly, this is the significant part that requires ingenuity and creativity. These are qualities unique to the human brain... until now.


Now I know what you are saying: "Big deal. Those are chemistry experiments." However, this brings us to the Cornell robotic computer. This computer sifted through data from a swinging pendulum. Without any prior knowledge of Newtonian, Hamiltonian or Lagrangian physics, it discovered the laws of conservation of momentum and energy. Of course it didn't call it that. It just labeled its conclusion as Law 42.0. The computer also yielded similar results when analyzing data from more complex systems such as the double pendulum problem and the Hannah Montana/Miley duality.

Finally, the researchers tested the program by having it analyze random data. They were delighted to find that the computer could not formulate conclusions from nothing. That is something that only humans can do.
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