Artificial intelligence helps scientists develop new general models in ecology

Ecosystems often seem chaotic, or at least overwhelming for someone trying to understand them and make predictions for the future. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are able to detect patterns and predict outcomes in ways that often resemble human reasoning. They pave the way to increasingly powerful cooperation between humans and computers. Within AI, evolutionary computation methods replicate in some sense the processes of evolution of species in the natural world. A particular method called symbolic regression allows the evolution of human-interpretable formulas that explain natural laws.