[Perspective] Machine learning for quantum physics

Machine learning has been used to beat a human competitor in a game of Go (1), a game that has long been viewed as the most challenging of board games for artificial intelligence. Research is now under way to investigate whether machine learning can be used to solve long outstanding problems in quantum science. Carleo and Troyer used an artificial neural network to represent the wave function of a quantum many-body system and to make the neural network'learn' what the ground state (or dynamics) of the system is. Their approach is found to perform better than the current state-of-the-art numerical simulation methods.