Artificial Intelligence Can't Deal With Chaos, But Teaching It Physics Could Help

While artificial intelligence systems continue to make huge strides forward, they're still not particularly good at dealing with chaos or unpredictability. Now researchers think they have found a way to fix this, by teaching AI about physics. To be more specific, teaching them about the Hamiltonian function, which gives the AI information about the entirety of a dynamic system: all the energy contained within it, both kinetic and potential. Neural networks, designed to loosely mimic the human brain as a complex, carefully weighted type of AI, then have a'bigger picture' view of what's happening, and that could open up possibilities for getting AI to tackle harder and harder problems. "The Hamiltonian is really the special sauce that gives neural networks the ability to learn order and chaos," says physicist John Lindner, from North Carolina State University.