What if the medical cure for cancer exists, but it鈥檚 spread out over more than 1,000 books and obscure journal articles?
The idea here, behind a project called Big Mechanism, is to build a computer software that can read everything ever published on a topic.
Computers can鈥檛 read journal articles, but if humans can teach them how, then the computers could compile 鈥渕illions of tiny results,鈥� says program manager Paul Cohen, and weave them together in a way that creates one big picture, instead of disparate journal articles written by specialists, for specialists. A machine reading an obscure journal article could determine 鈥� 鈥極h, wow, this obscure journal article pertains to this theory, and here鈥檚 why, and here鈥檚 who should know about it,' 鈥� Dr. Cohen says. 鈥淚t would change the way people develop knowledge.鈥�
