The Universe May Have Learned its Laws of Physics by Trial and Error.
hendrikboom writes:
The universe may have learned its own physical laws.
We present an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own physical laws. It does so by exploring a landscape of possible laws, which we express as a certain class of matrix models. We discover maps that put each of these matrix models in correspondence with both a gauge/gravity theory and a mathematical model of a learning machine, such as a deep recurrent, cyclic neural network. This establishes a correspondence between each solution of the physical theory and a run of a neural network. This correspondence is not an equivalence, partly because gauge theories emerge from N limits of the matrix models, whereas the same limits of the neural networks used here are not well-defined. We discuss in detail what it means to say that learning takes place in autodidactic systems, where there is no supervision. We propose that if the neural network model can be said to learn without supervision, the same can be said for the corresponding physical theory. We consider other protocols for autodidactic physical systems, such as optimization of graph variety, subset-replication using self-attention and look-ahead, geometrogenesis guided by reinforcement learning, structural learning using renormalization group techniques, and extensions. These protocols together provide a number of directions in which to explore the origin of physical laws based on putting machine learning architectures in correspondence with physical theories.
from The Autodidactic Universe by Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, and Dave Wecker.
This sounds like the kind of thing that would be rife with crackpottery, but I've looked it over enough that I can't say "it's not even false". It's not talking about whether we learned the laws of physics by trial and error (we did, that's the scientific method), but whether that's how the universe itself invented them. The authors see mathematical similarity in some formulations of laws of physics with some versions of artificial-intelligence learning algorithms. They explain this in some detail.
Definitely ground for further investigation, despite the catchy title.
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