I can't remember if this one was the same article mentioned by Michael D. on FastForward Radio, but I find it fitting to post this right after my last entry. Imagine this capability combined with Wolfram/Alpha. Imagine the trends and tendencies in nature and in human society it will be able to deduce that we can't possibly grasp because we can't possibly master the avalanche of data involved.

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings.

Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.

The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind