[Dn_Ab]

I agree that this wasn't done by the computer (did computers uncover the Higgs Boson?) but I also do not believe humans can take most of the credit: this was the result of a Man Machine System team up—trying to disentangle credit assignment is not a worthwhile activity. Roughly and from a quick reading of a paper thickly frosted with jargon I am unfamiliar with, the method works by creating networks—which highlight key relationships—for visualization by searching for stable clusters in a reduced dimensionality space of the variables.

Humans are there to explore the visualizations, interpret the network structures and understand the clusters and variables. The machines are intelligent too; they do the heavy work of comparing large numbers of points in a high dimensional space, factorization and searching for a way to express the data in a manner that makes it easier to uncover promising research directions and hypotheses.

Scanning this, it seems the most valuable contribution are their network visualization and exploratory tools. I think they should be proud of those and see no need to stretch so mightily to connect this to Stronger AI. As Vinge notes, "I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence."

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151014/ncomms9581/full/nco...

[Yomammas_Lemma]

>I agree that this wasn't done by the computer (did computers uncover the Higgs Boson?) but I also do not believe humans can take most of the credit: this was the result of a Man Machine System team up

You realize that they're using software made by a team of mathematicians and software developers, right? If you want to give credit to the software, give credit to the people who wrote the code and discovered the mathematics. This isn't any different than how physicists would use Mathematica.