How physicists programmed AI to do their job – by accident

A group of researchers recently developed an AI program to assist them in a complex procedure for an experiment involving finely optimized conditions. But rather than simply assist, the AI showed enough proficiency to run the experiment on its own and faster than humans or previous programs designed for the experiment. "I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," co-lead researcher Paul Wigley, a doctoral student at the Australian National University Research School of Physics and Engineering, said in a statement. The physicists from the ANU, University of Adelaide, and the University of New South Wales Australian Defence Force Academy, were attempting to recreate an experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize – creating a Bose-Einstein condensate, a super chilled gas trapped in between laser beams. Bose-Einstein condensates are able to reach temperatures so low that they are some of the coldest areas of the universe, in some cases less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the temperature where all atoms stop moving.