In May last year, a supercomputer in San Jose, California, read 100,000 research papers in 2 hours. It found completely new biology hidden in the data. Called KnIT, the computer is one of a handful of systems pushing back the frontiers of knowledge without human help.

KnIT didn't read the papers like a scientist – that would have taken a lifetime. Instead, it scanned for information on a protein called p53, and a class of enzymes that can interact with it, called kinases. Also known as "the guardian of the genome", p53 suppresses tumours in humans. KnIT trawled the literature searching for links that imply undiscovered p53 kinases, which could provide routes to new cancer drugs.

Having analysed papers up until 2003, KnIT identified seven of the nine kinases discovered over the subsequent 10 years. More importantly, it also found what appeared to be two p53 kinases unknown to science. Initial lab tests confirmed the findings, although the team wants to repeat the experiment to be sure.

KnIT is a collaboration between IBM and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. It is the latest step into a weird world where autonomous machines make discoveries that are beyond scientists, simply by rifling more thoroughly through what we already know, and faster than any human can.

The full article is short and worth reading.

As human history progresses, the body of previous research and knowledge in that field expands, and at some point humans may not have the time in their lives to learn it all (I'm setting immortality aside for now, though that is one potential solution). Computers, on the other hand, can read much more quickly than humans, and it would not surprise me if we start to see more and more of these computer-generated discoveries. The value of Big Data is still being debated, but this breakthrough suggests one path to unlocking it is shedding the limitations of human intelligence.