It's cool and very useful, but nothing really revolutionary.

I worked with an algorithm that does a similar thing- it comes up with a mathematical model for small genetic or metabolic networks based on measured activities/concetrations of genes/proteins/metabolites.

It doesn't do anything particularly intelligent. It's just a heuristic search through the model space. You have to define possible model structures (equation forms) yourself and the algorithm tries out different combinations of them while simultaneously estimating parameters.