AI discovered Copernicus' heliocentricity on its own

In the process, SciNet generated formulas that place the Sun at the center of our solar system. Remarkably, SciNet accomplished this in a way similar to how astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus discovered heliocentricity. "In the 16th century, Copernicus measured the angles between a distant fixed star and several planets and celestial bodies and hypothesized that the Sun, and not the Earth, is in the centre of our solar system and that the planets move around the Sun on simple orbits," the team wrote in a paper published on the preprint repository arXiv. "This explains the complicated orbits as seen from Earth." The team "encouraged" SciNet to come up with ways to predict the movements of the Sun and Mars in the simplest way possible.