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)
Anecdotally, in my experience, artificial intelligence is something of a God of the Gaps for computer science--techniques that work are appropriated by others, relabelled, and put to work. Someone who claims to be an AI researcher is essentially saying "I am studying things that don't actually work yet".
This is probably related to the long "AI winter" caused by the collapse of hype.
Not so, there are lots of problems in CS that you can't naturally label as AI problems. If you go in the opposite direction, saying that AI by definition solves all problems, then you can say that whatever unsolved problem you are working on, you are actually working on a special case of AI. But that's pretty void.