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GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

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Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#131

Post by bluecalm »

stouset wrote: post #120
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

When chess engines were first developed, they were strictly worse than the best humans. After many years of development, they became helpful to even the best humans even though they were still beatable (1985–1997). Eventually they caught up and surpassed humans but the combination of human and computer was better than either alone (~1997–2007). Since then, humans have been more or less obsoleted in the game of chess.…

The evolution was also interesting: first the engines were amazing tactically but pretty bad strategically so humans could guide them. With new NN based engines they were amazing strategically but they sucked tactically (first versions of Leela Chess Zero). Today they closed the gap and are amazing at both strategy and tactics and there is nothing humans can contribute anymore - all that is left is to just watch and learn.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#132

Post by CGMthrowaway »

godelski wrote: post #123
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the critical bit (paraphrasing): Humans have worked out the amplitudes for integer n up to n = 6 by hand, obtaining very complicated expressions, which correspond to a “Feynman diagram expansion” whose complexity grows superexponentially in n. But no one has been able to greatly reduce the complexity of these expressions, providing much simpler forms. And from these base cases, no one was then able to spot a…

> I think this was all already figured out in 1986 though They cite that paper in the third paragraph... Naively, the n-gluon scattering amplitude involves order n! terms. Famously, for the special case of MHV (maximally helicity violating) tree amplitudes, Parke and Taylor [11] gave a simple and beautiful, closed-form, single-term expression for all n. It also seems to be a main talking point. I think this is a prim…

You're right. Parke & Taylor showed the simplest nonzero amplitudes have two minus helicities while one-minus amplitudes vanish (generically). This paper claims that vanishing theorem has a loophole - a new hidden sector exists and one-minus amplitudes are secretly there, but distributional

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#133

Post by Paracompact »

lamontcg wrote: post #102
dotancohen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relativity comes to mind. You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it was proposed. I'd argue for special relatively as well.

Not really. Pretty sure I read recently that Newton appreciated that his theory was non-local and didn't like what Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance". The Lorentz transform was also known from 1887. Time dilation was understood from 1900. Poincaré figured out in 1905 that it was a mathematical group. Einstein put a bow on it all by figuring out that you could derive it from the principle of relativit…

Agree with you everywhere. Although I prefer the quote:

"Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore."

:)

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#134

Post by fragmede »

cpard wrote: post #126

AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing. This result reminded me of the C compiler case that Anthropic posted recently. Sure, agents wrote the code for hours but there was a human there giving them directions, scoping the problem, finding the test suites needed for the agentic loops to actually work etc etc. In general making sure the output actually works and that it's a s…

Right. If it hadn't been Nicholas Carlini driving Claude, with his decades of experience, there wouldn't be a Claude c compiler. It still required his expertise and knowledge for it to get there.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#135

Post by bananaflag »

Paracompact wrote: post #124
dotancohen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relativity comes to mind. You could nitpick a rebuttal, but no matter how many people you give credit, general relativity was a completely novel idea when it was proposed. I'd argue for special relatively as well.

I am not a scientific historian, or even a physicist, but IMO relativity has a weak case for being a completely novel discovery. Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway, and much of the methodology for exploring this relativity (by way of gyroscopes, inertial reference frames, and synchronized mechanical clocks) were already in parlance. Many of the phenomena that relativity…

From that article:

> The quintic was almost proven to have no general solutions by radicals by Paolo Ruffini in 1799, whose key insight was to use permutation groups, not just a single permutation.

Thing is, I am usually the kind of person who defends the idea of a lone genius. But I also believe there is a continuous spectrum, no gaps, from the village idiot to Einstein and beyond.

Let me introduce, just for fun, not for the sake of any argument, another idea from math which I think it came really out of the blue, to the degree that it's still considered an open problem to write an exposition about it, since you cannot smoothly link it to anything else: forcing.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#136

Post by davorak »

randomtoast wrote: post #53
outlace wrote: post #11

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to g…

> but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles Can humans actually do that? Sometimes it appears as if we have made a completely new discovery. However, if you look more closely, you will find that many events and developments led up to this breakthrough, and that it is actually an improvement on something that already existed. We are always building on the shou…

> Can humans actually do that?

From my reading yes, but I think I am likely reading the statement differently than you are.

> from first principles

Doing things from first principles is a known strategy, so is guess and check, brute force search, and so on.

For an llm to follow a first principles strategy I would expect it to take in a body of research, come up with some first principles or guess at them, then iteratively construct and tower of reasonings/findings/experiments.

Constructing a solid tower is where things are currently improving for existing models in my mind, but when I try openai or anthropic chat interface neither do a good job for long, not independently at least.

Humans also often have a hard time with this in general it is not a skill that everyone has and I think you can be a successful scientist without ever heavily developing first principles problem solving.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#137

Post by nozzlegear »

bpodgursky wrote: post #51
nozzlegear wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who piloted the helicopter in this scenario, a human or chatgpt? You'd say the pilot dropped them off in a helicopter. The helicopter didn't fly itself there.

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

"For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

— Carl Sagan

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#139

Post by decidu0us9034 »

cpard wrote: post #126

AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing. This result reminded me of the C compiler case that Anthropic posted recently. Sure, agents wrote the code for hours but there was a human there giving them directions, scoping the problem, finding the test suites needed for the agentic loops to actually work etc etc. In general making sure the output actually works and that it's a s…

I'm not sure you can call something an optimizing C compiler if it doesn't optimize or enforce C semantics (well, it compiles C but also a lot of things that aren't syntactically valid C). It seemed to generate a lot of code (wow!) that wasn't well-integrated and didn't do what it promised to, and the human didn't have the requisite expertise to understand that. I'm not a theoretical physicist but I will hold to my skepticism here, for similar reasons.

Re: GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

#140

Post by jonahx »

cpard wrote: post #126

AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing. This result reminded me of the C compiler case that Anthropic posted recently. Sure, agents wrote the code for hours but there was a human there giving them directions, scoping the problem, finding the test suites needed for the agentic loops to actually work etc etc. In general making sure the output actually works and that it's a s…

> The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding.

It's also a legitimate concern. We happen to be in a place where humans are needed for that "last critical 10%," or the first critical 10% of problem formulation, and so humans are still crucial to the overall system, at least for most complex tasks.

But there's no logical reason that needs to be the case. Once it's not, humans will be replaced.

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