Stanford Physicists Create AI to Disrupt Laws of Nature

Imagine being able to apply the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to invent novel materials that can potentially revolutionize many industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotech, electronics, plastics, semiconductors, glass, energy, nanotech, metal alloys, composite materials, ceramics, optics, and many more. In 2018, pioneering physicists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, announced in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) the creation of a new AI program (Atom2Vec) that was able to recreate the periodic table of elements -- a milestone first step towards creating an AI that can discover new laws of nature, and invent novel materials and compounds [1]. Atom2Vec was able to achieve this within just a "few hours," versus the many centuries it took for humans [2]. The way this was achieved was a cross-disciplinary AI approach -- applying linguistic concepts to materials science. Stanford physicists applied Zellig S. Harris' hypothesis on the distributional structure of language to atoms instead of words.