The Reuters article refers to two unrelated pieces of research. The first is about a laboratory robot (abstract) that automates some measurements, with software to analyze the results and decide what to measure next. Useful, but not really related to general-purpose AI.
The other is about a method for fitting differential equations to time series. I'm sure it has some applications somewhere, but I don't see any obvious way to apply it to AI.
but not really related to general-purpose AI.
Amongst people who actually build robots, it's generally understood that you don't get general-purpose AI by creating a 'general intelligence' and letting it run; it seems much more likely that we'll need a lot of small, task-specific systems that can work together.
I recently saw this Reuters article on Yahoo News. In typical science reporting fashion, the headline seems to be pure hyperbole - does anyone here know enough to clarify what the groups referenced have actually achieved?
This links represent what I could find:
Homepage of the "Robot Scientist" project:http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/
Homepage of Hod Lipson: http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/
Hod Lipson's 2007 paper "Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems" (pdf)