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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

#261

Post by DonaldFisk »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #250
lamontcg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying Newton was aware of quantum entanglement? Because that's what the "spooky action at a distance" quote refers to.

Newton wrote, "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

Source: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THE...

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

#262

Post by MatejKafka »

square_usual wrote: post #64

It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs. Like with the novel solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for erdos problems - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, LLMs hav…

I don't think it's about trying to handwave away the achievement. The problem is that many AI proponents, and especially companies producing the LLM tools constantly overstate the wins while downplaying the issues, and that leads to a (not always rational) counter-reaction from the other side.

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

#263

Post by davidmurdoch »

vessenes wrote: post #45
JasonADrury wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> found a formula that humans couldn't Couldn't is an immensely high bar in this context, didn't seems more appropriate and renders this whole thing slightly less exciting.

I'd say "couldn't in 20 hours" might be more defensible. Depends on how many humans though. "couldn't in 20 GPT watt-hours" would give us like 2,000 humans or so.

If only humans scaled like that

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

#264

Post by BitsAndObjects »

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…

At least Einstein didn't just suddenly turn around and say:

```ai-slop

But wait, this equation is too simple, I need to add more terms or it won't model the universe. Let me think about this again. I have 5 equations and I combined them and derived e=mc^2 but this is too simple. The universe is more complicated. Let's try a different derivation. I'll delete the wrong outputs first and then start from the input equations.

Let me think. I need to re-read the original equations and derive a more complex formula that describes the universe.

Great, now I have the complete picture of what I need to do. Let me plan my approach. I'm ready. I have a detailed plan. Let me check some things first.

I need to read some extra files to understand what the variables are.

Perfect. Now I understand the problem fully, let me revise my plan.

Okay I have written the plan. Do you accept?

Let's go. I'll start by creating a To Do list:

- [ ] Derive new equation from first principles making sure it's complex enough to describe reality.

- [ ] Go for lunch. When the server offers tuna, reject it because the notes say I don't like fish.

```

(You know what's really sad? I wrote that slop without using AI and without referring to anything...)

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

#265

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by acchow »

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…

> In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things

It seems to me that all “new ideas” are basically linear combinations of existing things with exceeding rare exceptions…

Maybe Godel’s Incompleteness?

Darwinian evolution?

General Relativity?

Buddhist non-duality?

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

#267

Post by nine_k »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #24
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…

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…

Sounds somehow similar to the groundbreaking application of a computer to prove the 4 color theorem. Then the researchers wrote a program to find and formally prove the numerous particular cases. Here the computer finds a simplifying pattern.

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

#268

Post by dakolli »

kilroy123 wrote: post #244
computator wrote: post #204

I have a weird long-shot idea for GPT to make a new discovery in physics: Ask it to find a mathematical relationship between some combination of the fundamental physical constants[1]. If it finds (for example) a formula that relates electron mass, Bohr radius, and speed of light to a high degree of precision, that might indicate an area of physics to explore further if those constants were thought to be independent.…

My dream is that powerful agents trawl through all the research papers looking for diamonds in the rough. They evaluate papers that look interesting and should be looked at more deeply. Then, research ideas as much as they can. Then flag for human review the real possible breakthroughs.

They literally cannot do this, they are not that much different than autocomplete that was in your email 10 years ago, with some transformer NN magic. Stop believing the hype.

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

#269

Post by godelski »

Paracompact wrote: post #235
godelski wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

To be clear, I don't think coming up with relativity was "in distribution" based on the results of the time. I would be exceedingly surprised if an LLM trained on all of the physics up until that point and nothing else would come up with the framework that Einstein did, from such elegant first principles at that. Without handholding from a prompter, I expect an LLM (or non-critical human thinker) would only parrot th…

  > To be clear, I don't think coming up with relativity was "in distribution" based on the results of the time.
This is difficult to infer from the context of the conversation.

  > only believe that (1) if it hadn't been Einstein, it would very soon have been someone else
I also agree, but am unsure of your point.

  > (2) "completely novel idea" is a stricter criterion than "not in distribution,"
Sorry, I used a looser word. If you have a strong definition of what "in distribution" means I'll be happy to adapt.

  > (3) better examples of completely novel ideas from history exist
Sure. Maybe? I can't judge. I think determining how novel something is really requires domain expertise. I only have an undergraduate degree in physics so I am not really qualified on determining the novelty of relativity, but it appears fairly novel to me fwiw. (And I am an enjoyer of scientific history. I'd really recommend Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics as it teaches QM in a more historical progression. I'd also recommend the An Opinionated History of Mathematics podcast which goes through a lot of interesting stuff, including Galileo)

  > I think ancestor worship is also an impediment to understanding our intellectual and cultural heritage
I'm in full agreement here (I have past comments on HN to support this too tbh. Probably best to search for things related to Schmidhuber since that's when ancestor worship frequently happens in those topics). It's good to recognize people, but we over emphasize some and entirely forget most. I don't think this is malicious but more logistical. Even Cropper's work misses many people but I think it is still a good balance considering the audience.

I think the best way to avoid the problem is to remember "my understanding is limited" and always will be. At least until we somehow become omniscient, but I'm not counting on that ever happening.

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

#270

Post by godelski »

nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #186
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…

[flagged]

  > Am I getting that right?
My comment was in response to the claim I responded to. Any inference you have made about my feelings about OpenAI are that of your own. You can search my comment history if you want to verify or reject your suspicion. I don't think you'll be able to verify it...
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