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This is amazing.

Computers are fantastic at deductive logic - taking a set of data and performing operations according to a ruleset to get something useful out of it. But they've been terrible at forming the rules themselves up until now.

If we can give computers inductive abilities then that's worldchanging.

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This wasn't actually inductive though.

Given crude initial conditions and some indication of what variables to consider

The only induction done in the whole process was done by the researchers in this step - otherwise the algorithm wouldn't have had anything to "evolve" to.

Quite right. I would say that if the inductive capacities of this system can be generalized beyond finding natural physical laws then this is a real start for Hard AI.

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