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How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

quantamagazine.org

11–20 of 60 posts

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#11
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something like optimal diets for everyone, I imagine it's more of an issue with incomplete understanding of diet, microbiome, genetics, epigenetics, etc. Once that's known, I'd venture to say you don't need AI. But a GAN where the discriminator is determining if a joke is made by an AI or a human might be pretty cool :)

> For something like optimal diets for everyone, I imagine it's more of an issue with incomplete understanding of diet, microbiome, genetics, epigenetics, etc. Once that's known, I'd venture to say you don't need AI. Even if the data exists, doesn't mean the AI folks would use it. In my research (a particular subfield of fluid dynamics), the machine learning/AI papers/talks always seem to have incomplete or even bad…

Yup. For example, look at this paper from Google: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0029-1

The whole thing is about how to build these fancy networks, and it created a fair bit of buzz. Table S1, in the supplement, however shows that it's rather pointless.

The deep model has an AUC (95% CI) of [0.94, 0.96] for in-patient mortality. The "full feature-enhanced" logistic regression baseline has an AUC of [0.92, 0.95]. Same pattern for 30 remission. Length of stay is the only one that's not overlapping, and it just squeaks that out: [0.86, 0.87] for the deep model vs. [0.84, 0.85] for the baseline.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#12
post #5

The article states positive impacts on science, but there are also negative impacts on science. For instance, the hype of AI has caused a brain-drain on related fields (such as cognitive science or applied mathematics). AI research itself suffers from companies buying up the academic talent. And researchers slap AI (which is usually deep learning) on a decade-old problem, without any care for complexity/benchmarks, i…

I love how many paper titles nowadays follow the pattern: "Deep- : ". And often they aren't doing anything "deeper" than a fully-connected multilayer neural network--a machine learning algorithm competitive with SVMs and been around well over a decade.

That's true, but there's a lot of value in waking people up to the idea that ML works, even if what they're doing has worked for a long time.

There are a lot of situations where before people would have assumed their best option is to carefully tweak a custom statistical model, whereas now they're just happy to throw a black box at it and see what happens. This is as much a cultural change as a technological change, and it's good that it is finally happening. That's what a "paradigm shift" is after all.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#13
Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work:

Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet.

Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the new planet. Give it feedback on how accurate is was. Repeat a million times. It should learn to pinpoint ninth planets in solar systems like ours, from the perturbations on orbits of known bodies.

Then feed it the real measurement history from the real Solar System. It should output the location of Planet Nine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#14
post #7
post #2

Can we use this to make an app and figure out the optimal diets for everyone? Or a GAN for generating the funniest jokes?

> Or a GAN for generating the funniest jokes? You really want to be careful with that, Monty Python made an excellent documentary about the weaponization of such high grades of humor and the results, to put it mildly, weren't funny.

Sorry what? Can you offer us a link?

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#15

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

Orbital equations are straightforward and deterministic, I am wondering why an AI would be needed for this? You could solve explicitly.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#16
Ever more algorithms and models and data, ever less understanding and scientific theories.

Soon, instead of "theory of gravity" we'll have "generative DNN of science papers and grant writing" that no one will understand, but can generate papers that pass peer review and earn grants and pull in all the monies, effectively monopolizing and halting all government funded scientific progress.

Meanwhile, actual science will continue on in the amateur ranks, from which has always come the true breakthroughs.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#17
post #7
post #2

Can we use this to make an app and figure out the optimal diets for everyone? Or a GAN for generating the funniest jokes?

> Or a GAN for generating the funniest jokes? You really want to be careful with that, Monty Python made an excellent documentary about the weaponization of such high grades of humor and the results, to put it mildly, weren't funny.

Monty Python made an excellent documentary about the weaponization of such high grades of humor and the results, to put it mildly, weren't funny.

It was a skit, and it was funny. Not their best work.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#18

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

Orbital equations are straightforward and deterministic, I am wondering why an AI would be needed for this? You could solve explicitly.

Also one perturbed configuration actually has multiple solutions.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#19
post #16

Ever more algorithms and models and data, ever less understanding and scientific theories. Soon, instead of "theory of gravity" we'll have "generative DNN of science papers and grant writing" that no one will understand, but can generate papers that pass peer review and earn grants and pull in all the monies, effectively monopolizing and halting all government funded scientific progress. Meanwhile, actual science wil…

[[citation needed]]

What has been an amateur science breakthrough in the last century or two which didn't have at it's base some billions of dollars of government funding.

Re: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

#20

Here's my crackpot idea, in case anyone out there is willing and qualified to put in the hard work: Start with a detailed model of the solar system. Make a million copies of it. In each copy, insert a planet in a random orbit, with random mass. Measure the orbits of everything, perturbed by the new planet. Feed the measurements of everything, except the new planet, to an A.I., and have it estimate the position of the…

Orbital equations are straightforward and deterministic, I am wondering why an AI would be needed for this? You could solve explicitly.

Just to clarify, the GP is describing what is essentially the n body problem in physics [1]. There is in general no closed form solution for solving n-body problems, but and so numeric solutions are generally required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem

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