Keywords: Artificial intelligence
A neural3 network that teaches itself the laws of physics could help to solve quantum-mechanics4 mysteries.
Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm5 inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the center of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to reformulate6 quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters.
Physicist Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and his collaborators wanted to design an algorithm that could distill7 large data sets down into a few physicists come up with concise equations8 like . To do this, the researchers had to design a new type of neural network, a machine-learning system inspired by the structure of the brain.
“It’s possible that the current way, [quantum mechanics is] formulated in some way just a historical artifact9,” says Renner. To move towards, he and his collaborators10 are trying to develop a version of their neural network that can not only learn from experiments data, but also propose entirely new experiments to test its hypotheses11.