When physicists associated with LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the US – gave AI a problem to solve, they weren’t expecting miracles. The goal was to redesign the world’s most sensitive gravitational wave detector to hear even fainter whispers from the cosmos. The AI’s first response was an asymmetrical mess with hundreds of components and a bizarre three-kilometre-long ring bolted between parts of the interferometer. However, the team, as reported by Quanta Magazine, continued to try to understand the logic behind the AI’s remarkable creativity.
After months, they realised something truly astonishing – the machine, despite lacking aesthetics, actually worked. It felt wrong because it counterintuitively added an obscure Soviet-era theory to sidestep quantum noise. However, it did achieve a breakthrough in a way that thousands of scientists and specialists working for over four decades hadn’t considered.
For those of us who have been reporting on AI for some time now, this ‘creativity’ is not new. In 2017, AlphaZero from DeepMind defeated existing AI chess programs in the game of chess by simply being told the rules of the game and playing against itself for four hours. It came up with counterintuitive openings, thought unwinnable, and left moves that we are still studying to this day. AI has been doing that for nearly a decade, even before the advent of generative AI.
However, as AI has been growing leaps and bounds daily, I believe it is time to ask what to me is one of the most intriguing questions in science today: Can AI solve quantum physics?
Can AI help unify quantum theory and relativity? That's the real question.
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