How cool is it that Wired has stories up on Archimedes and Eureqa [sic]. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?
The former is a sophisticated computer model that simulates human drug trails with uncanny accuracy. In 2004 they ran it and compared it against the actual human trials for the same drug and were remarkably (but not perfectly) accurate. How? It is a…
soup-to-nuts model that captures everything known by modern medicine, from the evolution of disease in different people — as shaped by factors like race, genetic risk, and number of hours spent doing yoga — to specific physiological details, such as the amount of heart muscle that dies in the hours after a heart attack and the degree to which medications like aspirin can limit that damage.
Eureqa sounds even cooler: it is a program that takes in raw data, and proposes scientific laws to explain said data. For example, it can extrapolate the laws of motion from data representing a pendulum’s swing. It took hours for it to discover what took Newton years (not to mention everybody who came before him). Oh, and it’s a free download if there’s a scientific law you’ve been struggling to discover. Be prepared, though:
“We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”
