Can AI Help Us With Our Unknown Unknowns? - DZone Big Data

When tackling with cutting edge science, it's not always easy to know what it is that we, as humans, lack understanding of. It's what Donald Rumsfeld would call the'unknown unknowns'. To try and overcome this, a team from the University of Vienna have developed an algorithm that can propose new quantum physics experiments itself, with the hope being that it suggests ideas that humans would never have thought of themselves. The researchers, after struggling to generate so called Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states themselves, began formulating an algorithm that might do a better job. They developed an application, called MELVIN, that takes the common building blocks of quantum experiments and then arranges these to propose unique configurations.