I haven't read the paper, yet, but it seems as though the article really inflates the claims for the robot's cognitive achievement. There were a set of candidate genes to test as the cause of each enzyme. This was a matter of creating a set of deletion mutants and checking whether the mutants produced the enzymes, a laborious task which would be pretty easy to automate without artificial intelligence. It does seem to be a helpful automation, though.
Yeah from what the article describes it sounds like at is simplest form a nested for loop varing across a number of variables. I assume it is quite a bit more complex than that but artificial intelligence?
The perception of what is artificial intelligence is changing all the time. Playing chess is just looping (and not even quite a bit more complex), but it used to be artificial intelligence.
