New York: An artificial intelligence system has solved a 100-year-old mystery of how a flatworm regenerates its body parts, an advance which suggests that computers may one day independently invent scientific ideas. The system was developed by researchers from Tufts University, in Massachusetts, who put it to work on data from experiments on planaria - tiny worms with an uncanny ability to regrow complex body parts.
“The invention of models to explain what nature is doing is the most creative thing scientists do - it's not just statistics or number crunching, this is the heart and soul of the scientific enterprise,” said Michael Levin, one of the authors of the study.
Potential models are run through a virtual simulator that mimics various experiments on planaria; then, the results are compared with the outcomes of published experiments in which planaria have been cut into pieces and sometimes manipulated with drugs or by having genes knocked out before regenerating into full organisms.
In each cycle, the potential models that best fit the results are “bred” with each other to create new models and less accurate ones are discarded. This process is repeated until the models “evolve” into one that fits the data perfectly. Experts said AI systems could also develop novel hypotheses about developmental pathways that could be confirmed through experimentation.
