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by BrandoElFollito 2162 days ago
I am actually surprised this is not more mainstream.

20 years ago I wrote my PhD thesis in physics, using genetic algorithms and neural networks to "guess" some basic physical behaviour in particle physics.

It was difficult to find good reporters because the application was quite exotic but I felt that this is something which would be worth investigating. I quit academia afterwards and did not come back - but I am happy to see that this road is back on the radar.
2 comments
blablabla123 2162 days ago
I wrote my diploma thesis 10 years ago and had to do a lot of pen and paper calculations. Actually it was kind of standard stuff (Lagrangians of Standard model, calculating parametrized decay widths) At that time I really hoped I could automatize the error-prone steps of plugging in and simplifying equations but I found nothing, except for isolated steps. Maybe this is also due to the fact that the most powerful tools for manipulating symbolic expressions are closed source. Not sure how it is now but as long as these tools are not expressive enough to work "end-to-end" with SM Lagrange densities, I doubt anything innovative could be done by automatizing that with AI.
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physicsgraph 2161 days ago
That problem of pen-and-paper calculations featuring unintended errors is what I try addressing in a project I work on [1]. My approach is to use Sympy (which has a lot of Physics support) to validate expressions entered by a human. Not quite the AI-focus of this thread, but still a machine augmenting the work of researchers. To your point about the complexity of the math, the Physics Derivation Graph is able to handle simple inference rules but there's nothing preventing more advanced use.

[1] https://derivationmap.net/

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stainforth 2161 days ago
What field or occupation followed for you?
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BrandoElFollito 2161 days ago
During my time in CERN I discovered system administration and joined a large company to be initially in charge for the IT aspects of the R&D divisions in Europe.

This then extended to greenfield operations, and finally I moved to information security.

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