admin
A team of Artificial Intelligence researchers got to pondering what would happen if they gave their neural net some basic hints to the classic physics principles to see if it could figure them out on it’s own. It sort of worked. The machine did discover a set of rules, just not anything that Isaac Newton would recognize. One of these days a software script-based entity is going to break the universe but it hasn’t happened yet.
Alternate Physics – Its all variable
Sir Isaac Newton did a whole lot more than simply invent the cat flap. He gets credit for noticing the force of fallation when an apple allegedly bonked him on the head. He wrote out a basic set of physics formulas which work together to describe the motion of everything around us in nature, from rolling marbles to orbiting satellites.
The quantum level is too freaky to fit Newton’s mold, so, we use totally different math for that, which is, as they say, “beyond the scope.”
Over at Columbia University they have a new AI program which “seemingly discovered its own alternative physics.” They showed it some videos of things like pendulum systems, lava lamps and flickering flames. They even had one of those air wiggler things that get used for promotional displays.
They were shocked when “the AI didn’t rediscover the current variables we use.” It came up with new ones on it’s own. They work but we can’t tell exactly what they are.
The team makes it clear that the matrix isn’t going to shatter or anything. This, they say, “doesn’t mean our current physics are flawed or that there’s a better fit model to explain the world around us.” Einstein and Newton are safe but their laws “could only exist because they were built on the back of a pre-existing ‘language‘ of theory and principles established by centuries of tradition.”
Aliens from Proxima Centauri might see the same universal truths from a different perspective and that’s what happened here on Earth at Columbia. Hod Lipson says he “always wondered, if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the Universe in a different way?” He just found out
The minimum number of variables
They started out by feeding the system “raw video footage of phenomena they already understood and asked the program a simple question: What are the minimum fundamental variables needed to describe what’s going on?” That worked out pretty well after a few tries. The first physics 101 video showed a swinging double pendulum that’s known to have four state variables in play: the angle and angular velocity of each of the two pendulums.
“The AI mulled over the footage and the question for a few hours and then spat out an answer: This phenomenon would require 4.7 variables to explain it, it said.” That was close enough. They still don’t know what their bot thinks those variables are.
After debugging their script for a while the team concluded that two of it’s variables matched two of ours measuring the angle of the arms.
Whatever the other two are, they are NOT “angular and linear velocities, kinetic and potential energy” or “various combinations of known quantities,” researcher Boyuan Chen explains. It’s physics, just not the Newtonian flavor. “Nothing seemed to match perfectly. We don’t yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking.”
It agrees with humans that the air dancer needs eight variables to describe the way it waves in the wind and so does a lava lamp. Those flames in your artificial digital fireplace require 24 variables to predict accurately. With each and every one of those, the things it picked to measure don’t match up with the ones that catch human attention.
“Without any prior knowledge of the underlying physics, our algorithm discovers the intrinsic dimension of the observed dynamics and identifies candidate sets of state variables.” Maybe someday they will get it to explain to them what they are.
