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Science
Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

Artificial 'inventors' are pushing patent law to its limits

Alan Warburton / Better Images of AI, CC BY-SA

It was the veritable search for a needle in a haystack. With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, researchers at MIT were sifting through a database of more than 100 million molecules to identify a few that might have antibacterial properties.

Fortunately, the search proved successful. But it wasn’t a human who found the promising molecules. It was a machine learning program.

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