AI Copernicus 'discovers' that Earth orbits the Sun

Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to discover new laws of physics, and perhaps to reformulate quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters 1. Physicist Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and his collaborators wanted to design an algorithm that could distill large data sets down into a few basic formulae, mimicking the way that physicists come up with concise equations like E mc 2. To do this, the researchers had to design a new type of neural network, a machine-learning system inspired by the structure of the brain. Conventional neural networks learn to recognize objects -- such as images or sounds -- by training on huge data sets.