Complicated physics problems are sometimes simpler than they appear, so physicists have made a machine learning model to search for the simplicity

Physics 18 May 2022

Concept image of artificial intelligence – machine learning is now being used to help physicists tackle complex problems

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A machine-learning AI can solve physics problems by simplifying them to be more symmetric.

“There are many, many cases in the history of science where people thought things were more complicated than they actually were because they hadn’t found the most simple description of it,” says Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To create their AI, Tegmark and Ziming Liu, also at MIT, used an artificial neural network, a computing set-up …