As typically is the case with AI, whether it truly adds any value to human work depends on the user’s intentions. For science, that means that, technically, AI can try offering an answer to a question, but it’s up to the experts to check its work and decide if there’s more to be explored. A couple years ago, physicists Giorgio Parisi and Francesco Zamponi reached a stalemate in their attempt to solve the jamming problem, a mathematical issue in physics concerning systems that suddenly turn rigid while remaining disordered. The pair from La Sapienza University of Rome in Italy tried asking the AI model Claude to come up with a solution. Claude’s initial proof reportedly had a lot of errors, but the underlying approach appeared to be a step in the right direction. Parisi and Zamponi pursued this idea and landed on a surprisingly simple resolution, showing their reasoning in a paper published today in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. “Quite quickly, Claude came up with an initial idea that was essentially correct,” Zamponi said in a statement. “The answer was right there, and we simply hadn’t seen it.”
A mathematical traffic jam A simple representation of jamming due to arch formation in a granular material. © Gsrdzl via Wikimedia Commons In physics, jamming refers to a process in which density increases in a granular material (think of a children’s ball pit), resulting in a system becoming rigid, sort of like a “traffic jam” of particles. Back in 2014, Parisi, Zamponi, and other collaborators mathematically described jamming, finding in the process that two parameters of the model would always add up to one.
