Researchers have successfully developed a new robot that is able to reason, formulate theories, and work on new scientific breakthroughs without the need of real scientists.

This marks the first time that a robotic system has been able to make its own scientific discovery with minimal intellectual input from humans.  Researchers have been able to create software programs able to analyze data for hypotheses, but this is important because the robot is able to take a scientific experiment from a hypothesis, experiment, reformulated hypothesis -- if necessary -- all without the assistance of humans.  

Despite researchers attempting to give robots human features, U.K. researchers are instead focused on workability and effectiveness, not looks.

"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," Aberystwyth University researcher Ross King said during an interview with Reuters.  "People have been working on this since the 1960s.  When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamed of the robots doing their own experiments on mars.  After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."

Researchers behind the new robot, named Adam, admit that on the surface the recent discoveries have been "of a modest kind" so far, but have faith that the complexity of researched conducted in the future will be higher.  To date, Adam has completed research into yeast metabolism, and has the ability to understand the results and plan what to do with the results.

Specifically, Adam was equipped with a yeast metabolism model and a gene and protein database, with human researchers only becoming involved when it was necessary to replace necessary solutions and remove waste.  It developed advanced hypotheses then created experiments possible to test its hypotheses.

This is a vital step towards new research technology where humans do not need to be involved as much as currently necessary for experiments.

The research team is working on the next-generation robot, Eve, which will have higher brain power so it can help compile research on new medicines.