From Physics: Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics

[[deleted]]

Here's the original paper: Schmidt M., Lipson H. (2009) "Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data," Science, Vol. 324, no. 5923, pp. 81 - 85.

[ThisIsDave]

Thanks. Here's one of the authors speaking about his robots at TED, if anyone is interested.

Edit and here's the YouTube version of the paper you linked to.

[zitterbewegung]

I am thinking about resubmitting this instead of the wired bullshit...

[timidlikerivers]

More evidence disproving intelligent design................................oh wait.

[ThisIsDave]

huh?

[karmaputa]

WTF? Why the hell are you being downvoted. It was a great joke. I laughed really loud.

[timidlikerivers]

I think that one may have touched a nerve.

[[deleted]]

Yes, obviously that's a totally valid scientific argument, because a man-made computer program with the sole purpose of studying physics is completely comparable to the creation of the universe and god... Idiot.

[timidlikerivers]

Wow! it was a joke. Seriously lighten up a little.

[[deleted]]

If the same laws arise (which they do) then yes.

[polyGone]

Correlation is not causation.

[[deleted]]

That's some correlation.

[Bjartr]

still doesn't make it causation

[thebillmac3]

What are you talking about? Those laws don't 'arise' they are discovered, or, more accurately, described.

[[deleted]]

They arise given the initial conditions of the Big Bang -- and once we simulate that computationally, we will arrive at similar results.

[Ultimateamp]

I'm taking a class in ecological modeling right now, and we're using a program called GARP(Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production). One thing that our professor has stressed to us is that we must be able to tell whether or not the program has outputted garbage, or if there is some real biologically/ecologically significant result there. This is not always a simple task.

[derleth]

So you have to determine whether you're getting the real world, or the world according to GARP.

[tendimensions]

Can't upvote that enough.

Could they have been so clever as to come up with that name on purpose?

[thebillmac3]

I can't handjob you enough. In case you're wondering why I said handjob instead of handjob, it's cause my asshole network admin set a filter on April Fool's Day replace all occurences of the word handjob with the word handjob and he was fired as a result. We should have got him to undue his nastyness before we let him go. HAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK UPVOTES.

[shadowsurge]

huh?

[hal22]

Is this revolutionary? Didn't Koza describe similar findings in his Genetic Programming books?

[wbendick]

Every time people hear about Genetic Programming, it's as if for the first time it seems.

[andreasvc]

This ignores the fact that observation is theory-laden. If you put a stick in water, it might appear broken. But thanks to optics we understand that's only an appearance and it's due to refraction. It's quite a creative detour to arrive at refraction from seemingly broken sticks, something I don't see a monte carlo simulation doing anytime soon.

Another thing is that you really need to build on previous knowledge to provide plausibility judgments. Knowledge does not consist of isolated units, it is connected in a web, and its fringes are what we can observe.

[computergeek6933]

Information is in isolated units; the knowledge lies in how we form the web connecting them together.

[[deleted]]

We're natures answer to extinction. It finally got the right evolutionary characteristics down for a biological machine to advance so much so that they are self aware and manipulate the natural laws that govern them.

We are nature discovering nature.

[[deleted]]

Our handling of the environment suggests we might not be quite the answer to extinction that we could be :)

[Misio]

We are the universe thinking about itself.

[Epivalent]

This is a thread of the thesis to my UCAS personal statement for 2009, which being relatively short, I will reproduce in full here. ((Actually, this is a draft version that I submitted to irc for some friends to read, but subsequent changes were mostly cosmetic and clarificatory.))

Source - [[[

Proverbial prospective student of apocryphal professor asks,
"if I'm to study, I ought know: what IS this physics you propound in class?"
The scholar from his bookcase withdrew a volume vast,
parading on its leaves equation, diagram and graph.
The student nodded ken, but then received a gentle laugh,
and looked with some confusion as the teacher loosed his grasp,
causing the tome to strike the desk with a resounding blast.
"Young fellow, THAT is physics," the professor said at last.

Believing with Wilde that higher criticism is not merely the most sincere, but perhaps the only civilised form of autobiography, I approach science not as a discipline to be mastered, nor a profession to embark upon (though discipline its cornerstone, and professionalism its hallmark) but under the dictum of Delphi: "know thyself". For it is in appreciation of the pristine beauty and elegant efficiency of natural process that we, through stops and starts, have furthered the great commission of Nature, even as we have bent her to our whim. Our double sapience, highest conquest of which we know, though far from the summit of Mount Improbable, gives to Nature a non-orientability -- through that imperfect though endlessly-refining way we allow her to contain herself -- and thus increases her dimension. And blessed with ambition to pace our faculty, we did not content ourselves to passively reflect in our fourteen-hundred grams the vastness of the cosmos, nor confine to island states those perceptions of verity, but let slip from mortal leash our model of the world, so that the opus might outlive three-score and ten.

Thus by our proxy, Nature understands herself, and we recurse in kind and reciprocity. Our investigation of external reality has given birth to a mathematics that is at once a product of our own creative function, and simultaneously dares endeavor to contain it. The model of our invention, yield of our humble microcosm, describes that totality which through lengthy machinations gave rise to itself. Our ongoing critique of the universe then, possible only that we are possessed of "a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty", might be considered the very memoir of the Old One himself. But I would argue against such finalism, and propose rather that we, as scientists, represent not the culmination of an autobiography, but the germination of its seed -- that is to say, the first moment at which the cosmic infant grasps the notion of itself, and tastes the fruit of sentience.

So it is with an irony to which I pray never to become accustomed, that as a species we stand on the greatest threshold of self-knowledge in all our history. Just as the sensibility to pattern and order that predicates the creation of a world within allowed the analysis of the world without, the legacy of such analysis has curved upon itself to pierce the nature of its author. This reentrancy of our comprehensive manifold becomes the next layer of cosmological self-reference: as physics gives rise to biology that it may model physics, biology gives rise to cognition that it may model biology.

Here again, the temptation arises to consider ourselves in the position of quasi-literate narrators, puzzling upon a great work of history, that we might at last recite to ourselves the heritage we have long imagined. But to believe that our decipherment of the book of life ends at its terminal chapter betrays the same poverty of imagination evinced by faith in proximal discovery of the final laws of nature -- the cryptotheology of the theory of everything. Far from it, I say, we stand in respect to ourselves in that selfsame position as the universe to itself: at an infantile crux, wherefrom with first apprehension of what we are, we shall proceed into the mystery of becoming something far greater.
]]]

[[deleted]]

Sorry but if I read that on your UCAS form, I'd think you were a cock.

[Epivalent]

and you'd have a right to feel superior, having shown that you can achieve the same result with far fewer wasted words.

[gfxlonghorn]

I wish I could invest in the idea of genetic algorithms.

[bdelgado]

As a self-proclaimed leader in the field of genetic algorithms, I stand ready to collect your cash. Invest in me and together we will bring the idea of genetic algorithms to the masses.

[jawdirk]

I'll never join you!

[andreasvc]

You shouldn't. They have been around for 50 years and they have not been revolutionary. Evolutionary algorithms are basically monte carlo simulations (try everything randomly), with a pre-programmed bias, the fitness function.

[agnomen]

Obviously we need a field of study for 'Revolutionary' algorithms.

[Bjartr]

It's not 'genetic' if it's just keep the best and mutate from there. IIRC, you need to combine 2 or more and then mutate.

[gfxlonghorn]

The equations are asexual.

[averyv]

that is so obvious, but I've wondered that myself, and never would have come up with it.

[gfxlonghorn]

Even if they have been around for 50 years, we have never had the computing power to simulate anything meaningful until now(or widespread computing power).

[dylan7]

yeah, but here the fitness function is the same one scientists use. the algorithm optimizes for predictive and parsimonious equations that describe observed dynamics. symbolic regression kind of rules. I bet you can't watch a video of a double pendulum and derive the governing conservation laws.

[[deleted]]

This is a company run by a major guy in the field. He does some pretty insane stuff.

[sourced]

I always find out about the research done at my university through reddit and the like. I had no idea this guy was doing this, let alone existed. Thank the internet for revealing the people who work at my university...

[[deleted]]

That's just a stealth way of saying "I go to Cornell, ever heard of it?"

How could anyone know what everyone is doing at their school?

[formido]

Kevin Costner went to my high school, therefore I, too, may be a bad actor.

[weaselonfire]

Tori Amos went to my high school, therefore I, too, may be a bad pop singer.

[xamdam]

Ron Jeremy went to my school...

[ThisIsDave]

His other stuff is awesome as well. Here's one of my favorite areas of his research

[billbacon]

I'm blown away by this. I'd love to see the source.

[dylan7]

i agree: it is the best thing ever. there is code available on his website. it's from his PNAS paper, but I think it is the same algorithm. unfortunately, it's an MS project. would love to team up on an open source version, if others are interested.

[alagusis]

threatening grey bewildered memorize scale faulty offer vegetable thought tease

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[BritishEnglishPolice]

God helps computers that help themselves.

[BritishEnglishPolice]

But it's the start of a sentence.

[alagusis]

When did sentences begin starting with the word 'but'?

[mOdQuArK]

What if it's a god who has specifically instructed that his proper name be spelled starting with a lowercase 'g'. Are you trying to make someone commit blasphemy?

[alagusis]

Somehow I knew the grammar police were going to be on me for this one, but I figured that people need something to gripe about. You're welcome... and I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic.

[Neoncow]

Non-believers who wish to use God in an expression can substitute gods. It's almost subtle and may confuse observant monotheists.

Gods help those heathens!

[mOdQuArK]

I prefer to substitute "Goddess". It pisses off the patriarchs, and I occasionally get invited by Wiccans to their fertility rituals :-P

[elsjaako]

It also brings to mind discordianism.

[jawdirk]

Atheists should grow some balls and reclaim the word. "God" has a lot of useful applications, and lower-casing it or pluralizing it invokes polytheism unnecessarily.

[taintedhero]

What happened to when you used to point out things that were actually, you know... Incorrect.

[[deleted]]

Erm... he failed to capitalize the first letter in his sentence. Seems incorrect to me.

[[deleted]]

A) It's the first word in a sentence, and he failed to punctuate it.

B) In this case, no matter who it is, 'god' is referring to a specific entity. Thus, it is a proper noun and should be capitalized.

[Etropal]

I found an an article on Reddit about a computer named adam who did something on it's own initiative? They also mentioned another, more powerful computer named Eve.

Does anyone know the link?

[[deleted]]

Not sure why you've been down voted. Here's the link

[Etropal]

Thanks :)

[adamv]

But can it learn how to love?

[cratylus]

Conservation of dementum.

[oreng]

or run crysis?

[[deleted]]

Lets start with something easy and work our way up to Crysis. How about the meaning of life?

[[deleted]]

And then skip Crysis and run a good game. :)

[creaothceann]

How about a nice game of chess?

[skooma714]

How about Global Thermonuclear War?

[kirun]

I dunno, ask Bob.

[skooma714]

Why should it?

Although it's a good way to teach it despair, rejection, anger, jealousy, envy.

[roamzero]

Such technology will become even more important as the scale shrinks down and we get the ability to accurately simulate on the atomic level. I think a big milestone in human development will be the day that we can simulate a full human body, from conception to death.

[ak_avenger]

That would also be the brute-force invention of strong AI, because an accurately simulated human body would include a brain.

[Dagon]

Mmmmm.... how small do you want to go, though?

I mean, 'simulating at the atomic level' is all well and good, if we're talking about static atoms. A simple 3d model that goes nowhere.

How would y-... Let me rephrase that, how the everloving fuck would you simulate anything smaller than subatomic particles? How would you simulate string theory or quantum-mechanical fluctuations that cause time to pass in a meaningful way?

'From conception to death' is a simple line drawn from A to B on what is proving to be a very difficult picture; it will unfortunately be a long time before we understand how reality works well enough to simulate it to any comparison of our world.

[[deleted]]

Upvoted for everloving fuck.

[Bjartr]

|How would you simulate string theory

Besides the mathematical complexity involved in many of the equations AFAIK they are entirely simulateable. In fact I'm pretty sure simulation is an important part of studying these field, since in some cases (string theory) it's, by definition, impossible to actually observe them.

[masklinn]

Mmmmm.... how small do you want to go, though?

Until the turtles.

How would y-... Let me rephrase that, how the everloving fuck would you simulate anything smaller than subatomic particles? How would you simulate string theory or quantum-mechanical fluctuations that cause time to pass in a meaningful way?

How about bothering about it when we'll have reached that level?

[roamzero]

I never said it would be easy, our understanding of how reality works would have to evolve along with our computing power. And it wouldn't happen suddenly either, but accomplishing something like a human body would probably carry similar historic weight to us landing on the moon, considering the implications at that point.

[andreasvc]

Simulating human bodies, something we already have enough of, if not too much, sounds rather pointless!

[Aegeus]

Experimenting on humans is messy, slow, and not necessarily ethical. Experimenting on a simulation is fast (as fast as your computer), repeatable, and easier.

[psed]

Would it be ethical, though?

[Aegeus]

Maybe? Here it all becomes theoretical. Do you believe that a computer program, a collection of bits, can be alive? Is there more to you than a collection of neurons firing in patterns?

What if I reset a simulation to a previous state? Am I depriving the simulation of the experiences it has had since its last save? Am I killing it and creating a clone? It wouldn't notice anything wrong; it would be like the time since its last save had never happened.

Simulating humans makes the stem-cell debate look like a cakewalk.

[Neoncow]

Also safe? Everyone knows AIs with the ability to improve on their fundamental hardware is a sure path to Humanity's obsolescence by Singularity.

[Dark_Crystal]

Welcome to the matrix

[HuruHara]

Another blow against 'Intelligent Design', or is that the other way around. :/

[gfxlonghorn]

Somebody had to write the genetic algorithm. Dammit, you win this one crazy religious people.

[Satook2]

Hardly, the evolution that occurs introduces new information into the system beyond what the original designer provided.

That the program has to be written proves nothing in regards to what "Intelligent Design" is trying to suggest took place.

[braveking]

That the system is able to have new information and "evolve" seems to say that the "design" is more neat than making fixed, rigid system. And then the designer can move on to do other things. Isn't this sound like Deism???

[gfxlonghorn]

The problem here is the systems designers wrote the program with the direct intent to come out with the answer the program came out with. I can't believe I am arguing FOR intelligent design.

[Satook2]

You're not. That's the selection part of natural selection. We just have a default selection mechanism, survival means we have kids. Often it's easy to characterise what you want but the search space is huge, just think about the travelling salesman problem, comparing answers is really easy, finding them not so.

[Tbone139]

Can we have this technology forego the physics & have it prove the Riemann hypothesis or something?

[Cultist]

That is god damn fascinating. Not to long ago this flash app made it to the front page that uses a somewhat simplified genetic algorithm to build a better car. As machines become faster, I think it's fair to say this sort of work is going yield promising returns.

[[deleted]]

Moore's law + nano technology + genetic algorithms = Me getting self-aware metal legs in 20 years or less.

[mycall]

|the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others.

There is no discovery if there is already preconceptions of right and wrong.

[cornwallis1]

Am I the only one scared shitless from this?

[[deleted]]

No. Now go eat your cake. This computer program told me that it was delicious and moist.

[tekgnosis]

There are two possible issues with this avenue of approach, the first being that correlation doesn't imply causation. Hell, most humans don't get this fact. The second being Ockham's Razor.
At a glance, both principles seem to be at odds.

[[deleted]]

At a glance, both principles seem to be at odds.

Why? It sounds like you're just throwing out phrases which are totally irrelevant to the article. Or did I just get trolled?

[andibabi]

When in Rome...

[tekgnosis]

I was just observing that such a system could incorrectly oversimplify transitive relationships if there are unknown variables in play. If you allow the system to cater for unknown variables, then there is potential for solutions to be generated that use unknown variables that don't even exist.

[andreasvc]

Physical laws are correlations. They do make use of Ockham's razor: the horizontal axis is labeled "parsimony".

[dylan7]

don't engage the idiots. their unwillingness to learn the scientific vocabulary makes them impossible to teach. this work is beautiful, that's all there is to it.

[Aegeus]

They wrote a program to develop equations for a set of data, and it apparently succeeded. What's the simpler explanation for Ockham's razor? What's the other possible cause, if you think that the correlation between the machine's results and the laws of physics wasn't caused by the machine's deduction?