Leave a message for your uncle, who is a scientist, telling him that his robot had arrived from the laboratory. Inform him that the person who delivered the package has said that an engineer will visit your uncle at 4pm the next day to programme the robot.
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Answer:
Explanation:
The history of human civilization is a story of increasingly advanced technology. Ever since our ancestors began to sharpen sticks to hunt, we have invented tools and machines to make our lives easier. From the wheel to the steam engine, from aeroplanes to computers and robots, there is no aspect of human life that has not been touched and often improved by technology.
Science is no exception, of course, but the latest piece of sophisticated technology—a robot called ‘Adam', which stands for ‘A Discovery Machine'—could profoundly change the way a lot of scientific research is conducted (Fig 1). This artificial scientist, which—like its Biblical namesake—is essentially the first of its kind, was designed to analyse data, suggest hypotheses and then carry out experiments to test them. Adam is fully automated and can run for days at a time on its own, requiring only occasional cleaning by a human technician.
…if Adam's findings were regarded as ‘real' discoveries, it would contribute to a long-standing philosophical dispute in computer science
Steve Oliver, another member of the team and Professor of Genomics at the University of Manchester, UK, thinks that such machines—which combine robotics with sophisticated modelling software for data analysis and hypothesis generation—will become more widespread, especially in microbiology and drug screening. “Much more of the drudgery of science will be eliminated. It's difficult to know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. If it's drudgery that requires a fairly plodding level of thought, but nonetheless thought, then that's a good thing,” he said. “An example of where robotics has come in to help with bad drudgery is DNA sequencing, which we used to do entirely by hand. It was bad drudgery because you really had to concentrate. You couldn't think about other things while you were doing the drudgery.”
Adam, in an earlier, unnamed incarnation, first made the headlines in January 2004. British scientists, including King and Oliver, published a letter in Nature about a hypothesis-generating programme linked to automated equipment that performed experiments without human intellectual intervention (King et al, 2004). King said the idea first emerged in 1999 when his group was working on the quantitative structure–activity relationships of chemicals and he did not have enough chemists to make new compounds. He was already working on software to generate hypotheses, so it was a natural extension to link these programmes to machines in the laboratory and automate the process.