Lifeboat Foundation

A University of Portsmouth physicist has explored whether a new law of physics could support the much-debated theory that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.

The simulated universe hypothesis proposes that what humans experience is actually an artificial reality, much like a computer simulation, in which they themselves are constructs.

The theory is popular among a number of well-known figures including Elon Musk, and within a branch of science known as information physics, which suggests physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information.

The most widely used machine learning algorithms were designed by humans and thus are hindered by our cognitive biases and limitations. Can we also construct meta-learning algorithms that can learn better learning algorithms so that our self-improving AIs have no limits other than those inherited from computability and physics? This question has been a main driver of my research since I wrote a thesis on it in 1987. In the past decade, it has become a driver of many other people’s research as well. Here I summarize our work starting in 1994 on meta-reinforcement learning with self-modifying policies in a single lifelong trial, and — since 2003 — mathematically optimal meta-learning through the self-referential Gödel Machine. This talk was previously presented at meta-learning workshops at ICML 2020 and NeurIPS 2021. Many additional publications on meta-learning can be found at https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/metalearning.html.

Jürgen Schmidhuber.
Director, AI Initiative, KAUST
Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, NNAISENSE
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/blog.html.

Continue reading “Meta-Learning Machines in a Single Lifelong Trial” »

To make its weather predictions, it analyzes 60 million daily observations from satellite, aircraft, and ground-based reports, using what we know about atmospheric physics to determine what the weather is likely to be like across the globe over the next 15 days.

This can literally save lives — if people know in advance that hurricanes or winter storms are heading their way, they can take action to prepare — but because the model is so complex, it must be run on a supercomputer over the course of several hours, which also makes it expensive.

The AIs: AI-based weather forecasting models are starting to catch up with traditional ones, like the European Model.

They announced the Nobel prizes this week! But did any of the recipients teach an AI to play Street Fighter? Here are a few of this week’s stories not yet lauded by international committees of scientists, but which we thought were pretty good:

Even if you think a galaxy is old enough to drink, you should probably go ahead and ask for ID before you serve them. The earliest galaxies in the universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope appeared too bright, massive and way too old to have formed that soon after the Big Bang, presenting a problem for astronomers and their favorite model, the standard model of cosmology.

Recently, a team of physicists at Northwestern University used computer simulations to model galaxy formation after the Big Bang and demonstrate that (at least in the model universe) stars formed in bursts, producing light of enormously greater intensity than a modern galaxy like, say, Andromeda, where star formation is steady and the number of stars gradually increases over time.

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature.

This new work on “assembly theory,” published today in Nature, represents a major advance in our fundamental comprehension of biological evolution and how it is governed by the physical laws of the universe. The paper is titled “Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution.”

This research builds on the team’s previous work developing assembly theory as an empirically validated approach to life detection, with implications for the search for alien life and efforts to evolve new life forms in the laboratory.

The Nobel Physics Prize was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists for their work on attoseconds, which are almost unimaginably short periods of time.

Their work using lasers gives scientists a tool to observe and possibly even manipulate electrons, which could spur breakthroughs in fields such as electronics and chemistry, experts told AFP.

Attoseconds are a billionth of a billionth of a second.

The universe is expanding, but why? Dark Energy might be the key in solving this mystery.
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Continue reading “Where Is the Rest of the Universe Hidden?” »

The Impact of chatGPT and other large language models on physics research and education (2023)
Event organizers: Kevin Burdge, Joshua Borrow, Mark Vogelsberger.
Session 3: “The use of large language models in teaching/administration”

Capstone talk: “LLMs for Physics, and Physics for LLMs“
Speaker: Dr Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research)

Radical theory explains how physics creates all biology’s complexity.