“We have designed a system in which a computer designs scientific experiments, instructs a robot to carry out those experiments, and records the results.”

I think it has captured people's imaginations and led them to question what is truly creative in the scientific process. It has also raised questions as to how principal investigators really treat their students and post-docs., whether as collaborators in the scientific process or if, they instead, use them as "discovery robots."

It's a new methodology that automates the process of scientific discovery, within a well-defined domain, thereby freeing researchers' time for doing genuinely creative things.

Scientific research is a complex activity, but often the path to a scientific discovery is clear, even if the nature of that discovery is not. We have designed a system in which a computer designs scientific experiments, instructs a robot to carry out those experiments, and records the results. The computer then compares the results with its existing hypothesis, revises the hypothesis, if necessary, and designs the next round of experiments to test it.