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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

#171

Post by stouset »

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'…

That is not what happened with chess engines. We didn’t just throw better hardware at it, we found new algorithms, improved the accuracy and performance of our position evaluation functions, discovered more efficient data structures, etc.

People have been downplaying LLMs since the first AI-generated buzzword garbage scientific paper made its way past peer review and into publication. And yet they keep getting better and better to the point where people are quite literally building projects with shockingly little human supervision.

By all means, keep betting against them.

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

#172

Post by buttered_toast »

lupsasca wrote: post #167
buttered_toast wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would interpret it as implying that the result was due to a lot more hand-holding that what is let on. Was the initial conjecture based on leading info from the other authors or was it simply the authors presenting all information and asking for a conjecture? Did the authors know that there was a simpler means of expressing the conjecture and lead GPT to its conclusion, or did it spontaneously do so on its own afte…

Hi I am an author of the paper. We believed that a simple formula should exist but had not been able to find it despite significant effort. It was a collaborative effort but GPT definitely solved the problem for us.

Oh that's really cool, I am not versed in physics by any means, can you explain how you believed there to be a simple formula but were unable to find it? What would lead you to believe that instead of just accepting it at face value?

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

#173

Post by godelski »

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…

  > Critique of absolute time and space of Newtonian physics was already well underway
This only means Einstein was not alone, it does not mean the results were in distribution.

  > Many of the phenomena that relativity would later explain under a consistent framework already had independent quasi-explanations hinting at the more universal theory.
And this comes about because people are looking at edge cases and trying to solve things. Sometimes people come up with wild and crazy solutions. Sometimes those solutions look obvious after they're known (though not prior to being known, otherwise it would have already been known...) and others don't.

Your argument really makes the claim that since there are others pursuing similar directions that this means it is in distribution. I'll use a classic statistics style framing. Suppose we have a bag with n red balls and p blue balls. Someone walks over and says "look, I have a green ball" and someone else walks over and says "I have a purple one" and someone else comes over and says "I have a pink one!". None of those balls were from the bag we have. There are still n+p balls in our bag, they are still all red or blue despite there being n+p+3 balls that we know of.

  > I am not a [...] physicist
I think this is probably why you don't have the resolution to see the distinctions. Without a formal study of physics it is really hard to differentiate these kinds of propositions. It can be very hard even with that education. So be careful to not overly abstract and simplify concepts. It'll only deprive you of a lot of beauty and innovation.

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

#174

Post by epolanski »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #166
epolanski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an obvious tension created by the title. The reality is: "GPT 5.2 found a more general and scalable form of an equation, after crunching for 12 hours supervised by 4 experts in the field". Which is equivalent to taking some of the countless niche algorithms out there and have few experts in that algo have LLMs crunch tirelessly till they find a better formula. After same experts prompted it in the right directio…

> GPT 5.2 after crunching 12 hours mathematical formulas supervised and prompted by 4 experts in the field Yet, if some student or child achieved the same – under equal supervision – we would call him the next Einstein.

We would not call him at all because it would be one of the many millions that went through projects like this for their thesis as physics or math graduates.

One of my best friends in his bachelor thesis had solved a difficult mathematical problem in planet orbits or something, and it was just yet another random day in academia.

And she didn't solve it because she was a genius but because there's a bazillions such problems out there and little time to look at them and focus. Science is huge.

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

#178

Post by NewsaHackO »

cpard wrote: post #158
elzbardico wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the results were far worse and way less impressive than what the media said.

the c compiler results or the physics results this post is about?

His point is going to be some copium like since the c compiler is not as optimized as gcc, it was not impressive.

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

#180

Post by lupsasca »

buttered_toast wrote: post #172
lupsasca wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I am an author of the paper. We believed that a simple formula should exist but had not been able to find it despite significant effort. It was a collaborative effort but GPT definitely solved the problem for us.

Oh that's really cool, I am not versed in physics by any means, can you explain how you believed there to be a simple formula but were unable to find it? What would lead you to believe that instead of just accepting it at face value?

There are closely related "MHV amplitudes" which naively obey a really complicated formula, but for which there famously also exists a much simpler "Parke-Taylor formula". Alfredo had derived a complicated expression for these new "single-minus amplitudes" and we were hoping we could find an analogue of the simpler "Parke-Taylor formula" for them.
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