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Heinzelmännchen reloaded |
By Nicola Zellmer
The word "impossible" is one that Marcel Thürk would like to erase from his thesaurus. With his company Matrix Advanced Solutions the 45-year old man from Göttingen seeks solutions for almost unsolvable questions - and uses that for software based on the principles of artificial intelligence. "There exist questions man can not solve," says Thürk. "For example, because tasks such as the prediction of climate change or the causes for the economic crisis are too complex and too high-dimensional, because erroneous and missing data are present, or because the experts very simply have the wrong perspective."
In contrast computer programs are unbiased. They can analyse vast amounts of data and derive correlation that a human would never have seen in this clutter of information. "Consider someone who enjoys swimming and hiking at his holidays," Thürk explains. "A normal search program would first look for the highest mountains. Then it would look for nice lakes and align both criteria. With this strategy the customer will overlook the most beautiful lakes in the medium mountain height range. This will not happen to our software. The software can generate a multi-dimensional map of the problem and search for all criteria in parallel."
This is possible since the programs developed by Matrix - in contrast to common programs - are completely self-organizing and evolve the required structures during their operation on their own. Therefore the user only needs to provide the right set of initial programs. From the given data these digital "Heinzelmännchen" (1) extract new correlations of which rules for the solution of the problem can be generated. "With this procedure we can work on any type of data", says Thürk.
The inspiration for this newly developed "Artificial Creativity" came to the bio-physicist and computer scientist during his work at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for bio-physical chemistry in Göttingen. There he investigated, at the working group of Nobel prize laureate for chemistry Prof. Manfred Eigen, the development of complexity in nature. "In experiments with a primeval soup of chemical building blocks it turned out that the molecules were never complex enough to explain the development of life", says Thürk. "Therefore we tried to mimic this primeval soup with computer programs instead of molecules. The programs were allowed to breed, reproduce, and recombine - where only the best survived." In the course of their evolution these binary molecules often developed in surprising ways. For example they helped viruses reproduce until they collapsed. "This shows that solutions beyond human thought structures exist".
After his doctorate Thürk worked in a biotech company and forgot about the evolutionary approach. "I already asked myself in those times very often if it was not possible to develop drugs in a much more efficient way", he says. "Still today drugs are found by trial and error. You look in a tube for a molecule with suitable activity. However how this works in the organism later on is unclear - to understand that later on costs millions."
So Thürk made experiments with further software building blocks - and succeeded. With the Israeli entrepreneur, Sion Balass, he founded the English company Matrix, its subsidiary in Göttingen that currently has 13 employees. "Today we are able to provide solutions for every cenario within one or one and a half years", says Thürk.. "The only problem is that we do not exactly know how. All that resembles a "black box", into which we can not take a look."
As a showcase project Thürk mentions the development of a coagulation inhibitor. "Current thrombin inhibitors show significant adverse effects", he explains. "To find a better compound usually thousands of experimental test are needed." The Matrix software however identified an optimal molecule from data derived out of less than 1000 molecules and produced it based on the guidance of the software, Thürk reports. "The result was a compound which was not only more effective than its predecessors. It also has no side effects and only acts on the inhibition of the vascular system." But the bio-physicist not only deals with economic data and new drugs, he also works with the youngest minds in Germany. "Children often are much more open for new ways of thinking than adults", he emphasizes. This is often demonstrated in the Robotics-AG of the Godehard elementary school in Göttingen, where employees of Matrix teach pupils the programming of Lego-Mindstorm-Robots in a community outreach project Matrix has initiated. The school has presented this project at the youth fair "Technik verbindet" (1) in Hannover. "And we are also participating in the final of the Ideenexpo" (2), Thürk gladly remarks.
Published in Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung,
July 2, 2009
original text in German
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