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I don't have any particular love for string string theory, but this work seems more sensible than several of the commentators here appear to think. One of stri
by eigenket 2y ago
I don't have any particular love for string string theory, but this work seems more sensible than several of the commentators here appear to think.
One of string theory's many problems is that it gives you an absurdly large number of different theories. We assume some of these look like our universe but we don't really know.
This work is attempting to find versions of string theory which match the real-world physics we observe, which could lead to cool stuff (but probably won't).
For example let's say there is exactly one version of string theory which has protons in it, then suddenly instead of looking at this vast sea of different theories with no understanding of what we're doing, suddenly we're looking at this one model that happens to have the proton and trying to understand that.
Edit: on the other hand if people do this sort of work and we decide that none of the different versions that string theory gives us match anything that looks like physics in our universe, that would also be interesting.
- input_sh 2y agoThe problem is that the word "AI" is in the headline, which nowadays makes people auto-assume chatbots, even though literally the first three words below the headline are "Using machine learning, ..." I feel sorry for the author, he didn't use the word "AI" once in these 3000+ words.
- jihadjihad 2y agoWhy do you feel sorry for the author? If he hadn't have put "AI" in the title, would it have led to a similar number of clicks/views?
- ergonaught 2y agoMachine learning is part of the field of AI. Blaming a word for the monkeypile is just silly.
- thesz 2y agoYou cannot find use of decision tree (aka "bunch of IFs") deduction and use in the current field of AI. You can find use of neural networks training and inference in the current field of machine learning.
- input_sh 2y agoAnd crypto used to refer to cryptography, not cryptocurrencies. If you use the word crypto today, most people will auto-assume cryptocurrencies. I completely agree with you that machine learning is a subset of AI, but if you just say AI, yes, it's not technically wrong, but we're gonna lose this battle again. AI is already just LLMs in most people's heads, as evidenced by this discussion.
- dartos 2y agoAI is part of the machine learning field. That is to say all AI is machine learning, but not all machine learning is AI. The fine line, as I understand it, is AI must be unsupervised and use weight matrices of some kind.
- furyofantares 2y agoI suppose it's possible that's where the terms are heading, but it's exactly backwards. AI is a very broad and old term; at least historically it even included all search algorithms for example. There is definitely no requirement for either matrices or unsupervised learning.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jrussino 2y agoTake an "Intro to AI" class at any of the top universities, and you're almost guaranteed to be using this textbook: https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ Check out that table of contents. There's more to the field of AI than Machine Learning, even if neural networks are the current hot thing. I think its more accurate to say there's a substantial and growing overlap between the two fields.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoThe problem is that if you've compared 10,000 theories to find one that fits, that theory now has to have 10,000x stronger evidence to account for multiple hypothesis testing.
- wcoenen 2y agoOr just test one new prediction made by the selected model, which isn't accounted for by existing physics. Edit: to clarify, I agree that it is important to avoid picking a model which happens to fit noise in existing data, which would be P-hacking. But I think this problem doesn't exist if you pick a model, predict something novel, and then go test that prediction. I could be mistaken.
- light_hue_1 2y agoThere's essentially nothing to test. Even in principle no one can find a way to extract some new physics that's even remotely observable. In any case, string theory already makes predictions, like supersymmetry that have failed every test so far.
- api 2y agoI always thought the biggest problem was that the major propositions can't be tested without either convenient access to a black hole (anyone got one?) or accelerators with multiple orders of magnitude more power than the LHC. So it's not that it's untestable because it's bad theory work. It's untestable because we're bugs. If (as I got nerd sniped about a while ago) the ninth planet in our solar system did turn out to be a primordial black hole, it would be reachable by probes and that would open up a lot of possibilities. All known black holes are far too distant to observe in great detail or reach.
- randomtoast 2y agoPerhaps we can create microscopic black holes for a few nanoseconds in the future, which would give us new possibilities.
- api 2y agoGet a Dyson swarm up and we can make a Kugelblitz: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics) It'll just take a few million satellites in close solar orbit shooting megawatt-scale tight beam X-ray or gamma ray lasers at a point in space the size of a pinhead and having all the beams cross there.
- AlexandrB 2y agoI think there's a growing number of people that think that string theory is a dead end and any further investment of resources in it is money going down the drain. From that perspective, regardless of how you use AI, this is just another wasteful exercise attempting to rescue a useless theory. Given that I'm not a physicist and don't understand string theory or its alternatives I can't comment either way - but I understand the perspective given how many resources were wasted on dead ends like blockchain-based replacements for databases in software development.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoGit is blockchain. Is it useless too?