Several years before ChatGPT began jibber-jabbering away, Google developed a very different kind of artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo that learned to play the board game Go with superhuman skill through tireless practice. Researchers at the company have now published research that combines the abilities of a large language model (the AI behind today’s chatbots) … Read more
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert? Oppenheimer: Yes, I can. I can’t hear the algebra, … Read more
Robert Brandenberger, a physicist at McGill University who was not involved with the study, said the new paper “sets a new standard of rigor for the analysis” of the mathematics of the beginning of time. In some cases, what appears at first to be a singularity—a point in space-time where mathematical descriptions lose their meaning—may … Read more
“It was pretty amazing how well the experimental data and numerical simulation matched,” Eckert said. In fact, it matched so closely that Carenza’s first response was that it must be wrong. The team jokingly worried that a peer reviewer might think they’d cheated. “It really was that beautiful,” Carenza said. The observations answer a “long-standing … Read more
