Artificial intelligence is already disrupting industries from banking and finance to film and journalism, and scientists are investigating how AI might revolutionise their field — or even win a Nobel Prize.
In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed what he dubbed the “Nobel Turing Challenge”, inviting researchers to create an “AI scientist” capable of autonomously carrying out research worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.
Some scientists are already hard at work seeking to create an AI colleague worthy of a Nobel, with this year’s laureates to be announced between October 7 and 14.
And in fact, there are around 100 “robot scientists” already, according to Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden.
In 2009, King published a paper in which he and a group of colleagues presented “Robot Scientist Adam” — the first machine to make scientific discoveries independently.
“We built a robot which …