In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.
Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.
The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough on behalf of science in the Petabyte Age, where computers endeavour to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big as well as complex on behalf of the human mind. (See Wired magazine’s July 2008 cover story on “The End of Science.”)
“One of the biggest difficulties in science today is moving forward as well as finding the underlying principles in areas where there's lots as well as lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists as well as programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex on behalf of human analysis.
Lipson’s program, co-designed with Cornell computational biologist Michael Schmidt as well as described in a paper published Thursday in Science, may represent a breakthrough in the old, unfulfilled quest to utilize artificial intelligence to discover mathematical theorems as well as scientific laws:
via Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics | Wired Science from Wired.com.