| Author | Message | ||
     Howard Mark (hlmark) Senior Member Username: hlmark Post Number: 298 Registered: 9-2001 |
Without having seen the site, it sounds a lot like the genetic algorithms for wavelength selection that were a rage about 15 years ago (I had to make that guess before I saw the method and it was shown to be wrong!) \o/ /_\ | ||
| Bruce H. Campbell (campclan) Moderator Username: campclan Post Number: 119 Registered: 4-2001 |
In the site, Wired Science, an article begins with the following: "Ever wanted to have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it�s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers. The program was unveiled in April, when it used readouts of a double-pendulum to infer Newton�s second law of motion and the law of conservation of momentum. It could be an invaluable tool for revealing other, more complicated laws that have eluded humans. And scientists have been clamoring to get their hands on it. �We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones,� said Hod Lipson of Cornell University�s Computational Synthesis Lab. �Those are unreachable right now. But the algorithms we�ve developed could let us reach them.� Eureqa is descended from Lipson�s work on self-contemplating robots that figure out how to repair themselves. The same algorithms that guide the robots� solution-finding computations have been customized for analyzing any type of data. The Wired Science URL is www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/download-robot-scientist/#more-15034 The program starts by searching within a dataset for numbers that seem connected to each other, then proposing a series of simple equations to describe the links. Those initial equations invariably fail, but some are slightly less wrong than others. The best are selected, tweaked, and again tested against the data. Eureqa repeats the cycle over and over, until it finds equations that work." The software is available for downloading for free, together with instructions on its use. Or you can go directly to the download site, ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/eureqa Bruce |