Will AI One Day Win a Nobel Prize?

AFP/APP

Stockholm: Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming industries from banking and finance to film and journalism, and researchers are exploring how AI could revolutionize scientific fields—potentially even earning a Nobel Prize.

In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed the “Nobel Turing Challenge,” encouraging scientists to develop an “AI scientist” capable of conducting research worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.

With this goal in mind, many researchers are actively working to create an AI colleague that could one day be recognized for its contributions to science.

Currently, there are approximately 100 “robot scientists,” according to Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden. In 2009, King and his colleagues introduced “Robot Scientist Adam,” the first machine to independently make scientific discoveries.

“We built a robot that discovered new science on its own, generated novel scientific ideas, and tested them, confirming their validity,” King explained to AFP.

The robot was designed to autonomously form hypotheses and create experiments to test them. It even programmed laboratory robots to conduct these experiments, learning from the outcomes to refine its approach.

As the scientific community looks ahead, the announcement of this year’s Nobel laureates will take place between October 7 and 14, prompting discussions about the evolving role of AI in research and the possibilities that lie ahead.