Can a computer come up with a theory of everything?

“When the AI ​​comes back and tells you, we have achieved general AI and you should be either very scared or very excited, depending on your point of view,” said Dr. Tegmark. “The reason I’m working on it, honestly, is because what I find most threatening is, if we build super powerful AI and have no idea how it works, right?”

‘A dialogue between man and machine’

Dr Thaler, who heads the new institute at MIT, said he was once skeptical of artificial intelligence, but was now an evangelist. He realized that as a physicist he could encode some of his knowledge into the machine, which would then give answers that he could more easily interpret.

“This becomes a dialogue between man and machine in a way that becomes more exciting,” he said, “instead of just having a black box that you don’t understand making decisions for you.”

He added: “I don’t particularly like to call these techniques ‘artificial intelligence’, as that language masks the fact that many artificial intelligence techniques have a rigorous basis in mathematics, statistics and computer science.”

Yes, he noted, the machine can find much better solutions than it can despite all its training: “But in the end I still have to decide which concrete goals are worth reaching and I can aim for ever more ambitious goals knowing that, if it can define strictly my goals in a language that the computer understands, so artificial intelligence can provide powerful solutions. “

Recently, Dr. Thaler and his colleagues provided their neural network with a collection of data from the Large Hadron Collider, which destroys protons in search of new particles and forces. Protons, the building blocks of atomic matter, are themselves bags of smaller entities called quarks and gluons. When the protons collide, these smaller particles splash out in jets, along with any other exotic particles that have coalesced from the energy of the collision. To better understand this process, he and his team asked the system to distinguish between the quarks and gluons in the collider data.

“We said, ‘I’m not going to tell you anything about quantum field theory; I’m not going to tell you what a quark or gluon is at the fundamental level, “he said.” I’ll just say, “Here’s a bunch of data, please separate it into two categories.” And it can do it. “