The Epistemosphere

Scientists are developing a computer that can read vast amounts of scientific literature, make connections between facts and develop hypotheses.

To be useful, a computer would need to trawl through the literature in the same way that a scientist would: reading the literature to uncover new knowledge, evaluating the quality of the information, looking for patterns and connections between facts, and then generating hypotheses to test. Not only might such a program speed up the progress of scientific discovery but, with the capacity to consider vast numbers of factors, it might even discover information that could be missed by the human brain.