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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

#141

Post by Insanity »

emp17344 wrote: post #86
Davidzheng wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is there's been around 10 erdos problems solved by GPT by now. Most of them have been found to be either in literature or a very similar problem was solved in literature. But one or two solutions are quite novel. https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution... may be useful

Some of these were initially hyped as novel solutions, and then were quietly downgraded after it was discovered the solutions weren’t actually novel.

Yeah that was also my take-away when I was following the developments on it. But then again I don't follow it very closely so _maybe_ some novel solutions are discovered. But given how LLMs work, I'm skeptical about that.

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

#142

Post by TGower »

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.…

With a chess engine, you could ask any practitioner in the 90's what it would take to achieve "Stage 4" and they could estimate it quite accurately as a function of FLOPs and memory bandwidth. It's worth keeping in mind just how little we understand about LLM capability scaling. Ask 10 different AI researchers when we will get to Stage 4 for something like programming and you'll get wild guesses or an honest "we don't know".

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

#143

Post by _alternator_ »

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…

Right on with special relativity—Lorentz also was developing the theory and was a bit sour that Einstein got so much credit. Einstein basically said “what if special relativity were true for all of physics”, not just electromagnetism, and out dropped e=mc^2. It was a bold step but not unexplainable.

As for general relativity, he spent several years working to learn differential geometry (which was well developed mathematics at the time, but looked like abstract nonsense to most physicists). I’m not sure how he was turned on to this theory being applicable to gravity, but my guess is that it was motivated by some symmetry ideas. (It always come down to symmetry.)

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

nozzlegear wrote: post #110
slopusila wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

now you are debating exactly how GPT should be credited. idk, I'm sure the field will make up some guidance for this particular paper it seems the humans were stuck, and only AI thinking unblocked them

> now you are debating exactly how GPT should be credited. idk, I'm sure the field will make up some guidance In your eyes maybe there's no difference. In my eyes, big difference. Tools are not people, let's not further the myth of AGI or the silly marketing trend of anthropomorphizing LLMs.

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by rightbyte »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #132
godelski wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> simplest nonzero amplitudes have two minus helicities while one-minus amplitudes vanish

Sorry but I just have to point out how this field of maths read like Star Trek technobabble too me.

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

#146

Post by bpodgursky »

nozzlegear wrote: post #137
bpodgursky wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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

I read the narnia series many times as a kid and this one stuck with me, I didn't prompt for it.

I have no real way to demonstrate that I'm telling the truth, but I am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#147

Post by baq »

suuuuuuuu wrote: post #121
woeirua wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably email the authors if you think that's true. I highly doubt they didn't do a literature search first though...

Don't underestimate the willingness of physicists to skimp on literature review.

After last month’s Erdos problems handling by LLMs at this point everyone writing papers should be aware that literature checks are approximately free, even physicists.

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

#148

Post by athrowaway3z »

rightbyte wrote: post #145
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> simplest nonzero amplitudes have two minus helicities while one-minus amplitudes vanish Sorry but I just have to point out how this field of maths read like Star Trek technobabble too me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn4fW0EInqw

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

#149

Post by mym1990 »

Many innovations are built off cross pollination of domains and I think we are not too far off from having a loop where multiple agents grounded very well in specific domains can find intersections and optimizations by communicating with each other, especially if they are able to run for 12+ hours. The truth is that 99% of attempts at innovation will fail, but the 1% can yield something fantastic, the more attempts we can take, the faster progress will happen.

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

#150

Post by baq »

TGower wrote: post #142
stouset wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

With a chess engine, you could ask any practitioner in the 90's what it would take to achieve "Stage 4" and they could estimate it quite accurately as a function of FLOPs and memory bandwidth. It's worth keeping in mind just how little we understand about LLM capability scaling. Ask 10 different AI researchers when we will get to Stage 4 for something like programming and you'll get wild guesses or an honest "we don'…

Chess grandmasters are living proof that it’s possible to reach grandmaster level in chess on 20W of compute. We’ve got orders of magnitude of optimizations to discover in LLMs and/or future architectures, both software and hardware and with the amount of progress we’ve got basically every month those ten people will answer ‘we don’t know, but it won’t be too long’. Of course they may be wrong, but the trend line is clear; Moore’s law faced similar issues and they were successively overcome for half a century.

IOW respect the trend line.

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