Towards Chemical Universal Turing Machines

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 21

Senior Member Papers

Present developments in the natural sciences are providing enormous and challenging opportunities for various AI technologies to have an unprecedented impact in the broader scientific world. If taken up, such applications would not only stretch present AI technology to the limit, but if successful could also have a radical impact on the way natural science is conducted. We review our experience with the Robot Scientist and other Machine Learning applications as examples of such AI-inspired developments. We also consider potential future extensions of such work based on the use of Uncertainty Logics. As a generalisation of the robot scientist we introduce the notion of a Chemical Universal Turing machine. Such a machine would not only be capable of complex cell simulations, but could also be the basis for programmable chemical and biological experimentation robots.