Researchers at IBM Research, Samsung AI and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) have built an 'AI scientist' able to combine theory and data to discover scientific equations.
The tool - dubbed 'AI-Descartes' by the researchers - aims to speed up scientific discovery by leveraging symbolic regression, which finds equations to fit data.
Given basic operators, such as addition, multiplication, and division, the systems can generate hundreds to millions of candidate equations, searching for the ones that most accurately describe the relationships in the data.
Using this technique, the AI tool has been able to re-discover, by itself, fundamental equations, including Kepler’s third law of planetary motion; Einstein’s relativistic time-dilation law, and Langmuir’s equation of gas adsorption.
Compared to other similar systems, AI-Descartes' biggest strength is its ability to logically reason, the researchers said. If there...