The Register Brains, cancer and computers: "The race is on to apply machine learning to biology. The starting gun was fired in 2002 when research company Correlogic stunned the medical world with the announcement of a vastly improved test for detecting ovarian cancer. The new test was simple - a few drops of blood are all that's required - yet reliable. What made it truly remarkable was that the test was discovered by machine."
One may wonder how a computer can possibly "discover" anything -- usually computers either contain the information, or are given it by humans, and can't actually discover anything in the typical sense. "The remarkable thing is that the machine discovered it independently with minimal human help. Researchers Zhang, Baral and Kim of Arizona University programmed the learning algorithm, pointed it at a biology database, and – with a few clues - let it loose" (original article). The author of the article points out that, without huge and meticulous databases to peruse, the computer and its algorithm would be virtually useless -- he calls database information the "lifeblood" of the machine's research. I have a database class right now, and from what I know, having such a vast and detailed database in the area of the biological sciences is no small task. Computers can analyze patterns that humans could probably never discern, but without massive amounts of data, they can't creatively or arbitrarily "think of" things.
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