
AI learns and recreates physics experiment - raverbashing
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/ai-learns-and-recreates-nobel-winning-physics-experiment/
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daveguy
“It did things a person wouldn’t guess, such as changing one laser’s power up
and down, and compensating with another,”

This sounds suspiciously like slapping the term "AI" on to a oscillating
feedback control loop.

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aab0
I'm sure a Gaussian process could model the equivalent of feedback control;
they're pretty flexible (if not as flexible as NNs). The trick is coming up
with something that can learn the feedback controls, or lack thereof, on its
own. Unsurprisingly, they're reinventing reinforcement learning.

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cmrx64
Source code here:
[https://github.com/michaelhush/M-LOOP](https://github.com/michaelhush/M-LOOP)

This is a neat application of ML! In the same way that automated theorem
provers have had huge impact on doing mechanized proofs, perhaps "automated
lab assistant" could have a similar impact on the experimental sciences.

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dwiel
It looks like they've hooked up standard function optimization techniques to
their lab equipment. Nothing new from an ML perspective. Is there something
clever in the way they parameterized the space of possible experiments?

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cmrx64
No, this is standard issue ML. It's the application that is neat, not the
technique.

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m4dc4pXXX
Pretty good sense of humor from that author:

'This AI is extremely specific in its design, of course, ... for more flexible
automation, physicists will still have to rely on the general-purpose research
units called “graduate students.”'

