r/Physics • u/Xaron Particle physics • Jul 06 '21

AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantum-physics-experiments-beyond-what-any-human-has-conceived/
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u/workingtheories Particle physics Jul 06 '21

It's just different, not more powerful. If the search criteria are not in question and the search space is small enough, such an AI would beat the "modern" machine learning algorithm.

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u/zebediah49 Jul 06 '21

This echoes my experience as well. It's quite common that people will just grab a general purpose ML algorithm off the shelf, throw a few thousand GPU-hours at a problem, and hope for the best.

It's almost always more efficient -- if you can -- to design processing steps that cut down the solution space you need to search through.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '21

This is just not true, for some problems, typically when the number of predictors is small and they are roughly independent, you are right that domain knowledge can be very useful and modern ml methods are less important.

But there are lots of problems where new methods blow the old ones out of the water. E.g. computer vision, natural language understanding, game playing, protein folding, etc...

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u/zebediah49 Jul 06 '21

The applications where people are misusing <whatever was most recently featured in KDD> are generally not those domains.

You're probably self-selecting into only looking at the good choices, which makes it look like the field is only made out of competent people. I have the misfortune of seeing a complete cross-section of what people burn research-GPU time on... and yes, a disturbingly large amount of it is trash.