Century ago physicists, chemists, researchers did plenty of experiments to find new materials, or new properties of existing material. But how many experiments you can do manually in lab? 10-100? Maybe 100-1k? There is definitely bottleneck.

With introduction of computers and automated systems it becomes much easier to make those experiments. But it still limited by time and material. You can’t scale it exponentially, best trajectory is below the linear ‘cause of scalability costs.

Imagine you need to combine 100 materials with each other up to 10 in line where order matter. It is technically impossible to do that with time and resources limit. So we need an heuristic to find in what direction we should move. Which sounds like Gradient Descent. That’s why I think we have totally no future in sciense without AI/ML algorythms.