"Epic or Scary?" --AI That Can Discover a New Law of Nature

"We wanted to know whether an AI can be smart enough to discover the periodic table on its own, and our team showed that it can," said study leader Shou-Cheng Zhang, the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics at Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. Zhang says the research, published in the June 25 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an important first step toward a more ambitious goal of his, which is designing a replacement to the Turing test – the current gold standard for gauging machine intelligence. In order for an AI to pass the Turing test, it must be capable of responding to written questions in ways that are indistinguishable from a human. But Zhang thinks the test is flawed because it is subjective. "Humans are the product of evolution and our minds are cluttered with all sorts of irrationalities. For an AI to pass the Turing test, it would need to reproduce all of our human irrationalities," Zhang said.