Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed an artificial intelligence - "AI Physicist", which can come up with new theories about physical laws in fictional universes. The technology description is published in Vice.
The journalists of the publication note that AI Physicist is a completely new approach to creating artificial intelligence. Whereas traditional models use existing templates and databases for training or prediction, AI Physicist can create custom templates for learning models, as well as combine a huge number of different mini-templates and small parts to create one - a general model.
An example of an environment that was developed by artificial intelligence.
To create new large-scale physical theories based on fictional universes, four strategies are built into the algorithm - the generation of many theories, each of which corresponds to one or several pieces of data, the choice of the simplest theory from them, their further combination and an attempt to transfer the theory to existing data.
To train artificial intelligence, scientists have presented AI Physicist with a series of increasingly complex virtual worlds that are governed by random physical laws. AI Physicist needed to understand exactly what laws operate in these universes, in particular, the neural network had to predict the movement of an object from point A to point B. For this, AI Physicist had to come up with fictional physical theories that would explain the movement of objects in such a world.