6 ms·

Ugh... Sorry but this is not physics.

thriftwy 4y ago
Why not? It will surely have the same bounding box as our own physics, but the laws may be represented in completely different fashion. They would mostly map to each other, though. Or maybe not. Maybe the "AI physics" has predictions for phenomena which our physics never bothered to figure out, whereas it would ignore large chunks of our physics area as irrelevant.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  This is more like the empirical "laws" that various engineering disciplines use. I.e. some number crunching that has no theoretical foundations whatsoever, but seems to be working anyway.
  - dmos62 4y ago
    What is physics, if not a transition between states? Whether the merchanism that predicts those transitions is machine- or human-interpretable is orthogonal.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      An attempt to describe fundamental nature of the word, best as we can get at it. Unless you're an antirealist, or you think the universe is just information.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - thriftwy 4y ago
        Even if universe is still information, knowing laws which govern change of that information is no lesser valuable.
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    This reminds me of my tribology course. The professor said at the beginning that there weren't many real equations but here are some lookup tables.
Daub 4y ago
Agreed, if only for the reason that the AI seems to be making observations of the physical world based on videos thereof.
- samloveshummus 4y ago
  I don't see why that's relevant, a video camera is just another instrument that records data, not essentially different from the detectors at the LHC, albeit completely un-optimized - which is necessary for this experiment to work.
  - Daub 4y ago
    If all the AI is seeing of the world is a digital image, then they are likely to mistake the digital image for the world. As far as I know, the article claims that the AI has discovered new physical variables, yet the researchers are unsure as to what they are. For all we know, these variables are the distance of objects from the edge of the image frame.
Shorel 4y ago
Apart from some very slow atom and particle simulations... Is not most physics based on very extreme oversimplifications? They are still very useful because errors average out, but for example: we don't know why fluid simulations work, in fact aerodynamics is an entire empirical field. This was seen in F1 this year. All cars bouncing on straights, it was even given the name porpoising by the pilots. The teams never expected it, because the simulations never discovered anything about it. Also: all the work of AlphaFold predicting protein structures. Physics are awesome at predicting planetary motion, but stuff at smaller scales require a lot of empirical engineering to figure out.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  > but stuff at smaller scales require a lot of empirical engineering to figure out. And that made the fortune of CAD software designers.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  The porpoising is apparently because the more expensive higher speed wind tunnel analysis is banned. Engineering needs engineering,. Physics does not. The interesting thing about aero in physics is the emergence of extremely complicated phenomena, not the equations as per se.
samloveshummus 4y ago
I'm not sure why you don't think it's Physics. It's about formulating laws that describe the behaviour of physical systems - that's the essence of what Physics is. I have a PhD in high energy theory and this really seems like Physics to me.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Sure, if the pseudoscientific description of factor analysis applied to images is correct, then it's phyiscs. As-is, it's pseudoscience. What happens when you do a factor analysis on images? You get some measure of the axes of geometrical variance across those images. Are those axes "related" to any physical variables, sure -- but almost never directly. To suppose the system itself had these properties is to suppose, for example, constellations actually exist and cause your personality traits. Everything we want to know is what phyical properties of the system give rise to the observed consistent correlations in geometrical properties. *THAT* is physics. Showing these geometrical properties exist and are consistent is just what we're trying to explain. You cannot go from images to the domain of physics -- there are an infinite number of theories consistent with these images domains. And this is pseudoscience.
  - samloveshummus 4y ago
    It's really easy to test whether or not it works - see how well the model predicts on out-of-training sample data. That wouldn't work with astrology. There's no such thing as "physical properties of the system" other than measurable quantities that can be used to make predictions, which is what this does. There's no reason to be sure that temperature, for example, is a "real" physical property of a system rather than just one of many variables that would help us model it and understand it. Do you think it's pseudoscientific because there's no theory-ladenness in the predictions?
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      It's pseudoscience because there's nothing in the geometrical properties of those images called "gravity", etc. One can generate those pixel patterns from an infinite number of theories with an infinite variety of causally efficacious parameters. From the article, it doesn't work. They found on known physics it gives 4.7 dimensions, of which only two are explicable -- 4 is correct; the others have no known physical interpretation. No surprises: those two are just the geometric properties of the system (angles) which are actually properties of the image. The others are pure bullshit. Since, of course, the real physical parameters of the system we take to have generated those images are not present in them. The images are distal effects of these things Only in cases where the geometric properties of the target system are causally relevant to its actual causal properties will this work -- ie., only when "angles matter" Thinking you can infer laws of nature from images is pseudoscience, and these guys need to think more carefully about why we experiment in the first place eg., Consider that if mass is a relevant causal property, there'd be no way of inferring it from images: two objects can be visually identical whilst having radically different masses... making images *OBVIOUSLY* not a measure of mass... this project almost defines the modern kind of schizophrenic pseudoscience born of this wave of AI

Why not? It will surely have the same bounding box as our own physics, but the laws may be represented in completely different fashion. They would mostly map to each other, though. Or maybe not. Maybe the "AI physics" has predictions for phenomena which our physics never bothered to figure out, whereas it would ignore large chunks of our physics area as irrelevant.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
This is more like the empirical "laws" that various engineering disciplines use. I.e. some number crunching that has no theoretical foundations whatsoever, but seems to be working anyway.
- dmos62 4y ago
  What is physics, if not a transition between states? Whether the merchanism that predicts those transitions is machine- or human-interpretable is orthogonal.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    An attempt to describe fundamental nature of the word, best as we can get at it. Unless you're an antirealist, or you think the universe is just information.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      Even if universe is still information, knowing laws which govern change of that information is no lesser valuable.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  This reminds me of my tribology course. The professor said at the beginning that there weren't many real equations but here are some lookup tables.

Daub 4y ago

Agreed, if only for the reason that the AI seems to be making observations of the physical world based on videos thereof.

samloveshummus 4y ago
I don't see why that's relevant, a video camera is just another instrument that records data, not essentially different from the detectors at the LHC, albeit completely un-optimized - which is necessary for this experiment to work.
- Daub 4y ago
  If all the AI is seeing of the world is a digital image, then they are likely to mistake the digital image for the world. As far as I know, the article claims that the AI has discovered new physical variables, yet the researchers are unsure as to what they are. For all we know, these variables are the distance of objects from the edge of the image frame.

Shorel 4y ago

Apart from some very slow atom and particle simulations... Is not most physics based on very extreme oversimplifications? They are still very useful because errors average out, but for example: we don't know why fluid simulations work, in fact aerodynamics is an entire empirical field. This was seen in F1 this year. All cars bouncing on straights, it was even given the name porpoising by the pilots. The teams never expected it, because the simulations never discovered anything about it. Also: all the work of AlphaFold predicting protein structures. Physics are awesome at predicting planetary motion, but stuff at smaller scales require a lot of empirical engineering to figure out.

JPLeRouzic 4y ago
> but stuff at smaller scales require a lot of empirical engineering to figure out. And that made the fortune of CAD software designers.
mhh__ 4y ago
The porpoising is apparently because the more expensive higher speed wind tunnel analysis is banned. Engineering needs engineering,. Physics does not. The interesting thing about aero in physics is the emergence of extremely complicated phenomena, not the equations as per se.

samloveshummus 4y ago

I'm not sure why you don't think it's Physics. It's about formulating laws that describe the behaviour of physical systems - that's the essence of what Physics is. I have a PhD in high energy theory and this really seems like Physics to me.

mjburgess 4y ago
Sure, if the pseudoscientific description of factor analysis applied to images is correct, then it's phyiscs. As-is, it's pseudoscience. What happens when you do a factor analysis on images? You get some measure of the axes of geometrical variance across those images. Are those axes "related" to any physical variables, sure -- but almost never directly. To suppose the system itself had these properties is to suppose, for example, constellations actually exist and cause your personality traits. Everything we want to know is what phyical properties of the system give rise to the observed consistent correlations in geometrical properties. *THAT* is physics. Showing these geometrical properties exist and are consistent is just what we're trying to explain. You cannot go from images to the domain of physics -- there are an infinite number of theories consistent with these images domains. And this is pseudoscience.
- samloveshummus 4y ago
  It's really easy to test whether or not it works - see how well the model predicts on out-of-training sample data. That wouldn't work with astrology. There's no such thing as "physical properties of the system" other than measurable quantities that can be used to make predictions, which is what this does. There's no reason to be sure that temperature, for example, is a "real" physical property of a system rather than just one of many variables that would help us model it and understand it. Do you think it's pseudoscientific because there's no theory-ladenness in the predictions?
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    It's pseudoscience because there's nothing in the geometrical properties of those images called "gravity", etc. One can generate those pixel patterns from an infinite number of theories with an infinite variety of causally efficacious parameters. From the article, it doesn't work. They found on known physics it gives 4.7 dimensions, of which only two are explicable -- 4 is correct; the others have no known physical interpretation. No surprises: those two are just the geometric properties of the system (angles) which are actually properties of the image. The others are pure bullshit. Since, of course, the real physical parameters of the system we take to have generated those images are not present in them. The images are distal effects of these things Only in cases where the geometric properties of the target system are causally relevant to its actual causal properties will this work -- ie., only when "angles matter" Thinking you can infer laws of nature from images is pseudoscience, and these guys need to think more carefully about why we experiment in the first place eg., Consider that if mass is a relevant causal property, there'd be no way of inferring it from images: two objects can be visually identical whilst having radically different masses... making images *OBVIOUSLY* not a measure of mass... this project almost defines the modern kind of schizophrenic pseudoscience born of this wave of AI