quanta magazine - CybAI news

14 Jul

Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, mathematics, quanta magazine, science

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career:Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert?Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.I can’t hear the algebra, but I feel the machine.I felt the machine even before I touched a computer. In the 1970s I awaited the arrival of my first one, a Radio Shack TRS-80, imagining how it would function. I wrote some simple programs on paper and could feel the machine I didn’t yet…

16 Jun

Light-Based Chips Could Help Slake AI’s Ever-Growing Thirst for Energy

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, energy, quanta magazine, science

“What we have here is something incredibly simple,” said Tianwei Wu, the study’s lead author. “We can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly.” The researchers used the system to design a neural network that successfully discriminated vowel sounds. Most photonic systems need to be trained before they’re built, since training necessarily involves reconfiguring connections. But since this system is easily reconfigured, the researchers trained the model after it was installed on the semiconductor. They now plan to increase the size of the chip and encode more information in different colors of light, which should increase the amount…

09 Jun

How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, machine learning, quanta magazine

Posing a far greater challenge for AI researchers was the game of Diplomacy—a favorite of politicians like John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Instead of just two opponents, the game features seven players whose motives can be hard to read. To win, a player must negotiate, forging cooperative arrangements that anyone could breach at any time. Diplomacy is so complex that a group from Meta was pleased when, in 2022, its AI program Cicero developed “human-level play” over the course of 40 games. While it did not vanquish the world champion, Cicero did well enough to place in the top…

26 May

Does String Theory Actually Describe the World? AI May Be Able to Tell

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, physics, quanta magazine, science, string theory

A group led by string theory veterans Burt Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania and Andre Lukas of Oxford went further. They too started with Ruehle’s metric-calculating software, which Lukas had helped develop. Building on that foundation, they added an array of 11 neural networks to handle the different types of sprinkles. These networks allowed them to calculate an assortment of fields that could take on a richer variety of shapes, creating a more realistic setting that can’t be studied with any other techniques. This army of machines learned the metric and the arrangement of the fields, calculated the Yukawa…