A team of experts has created the first artificially intelligent simulation of our universe.
The problem is, they don’t understand it.
Astrophysicists at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City created a model called the Deep Density Displacement Model (or D3M for short)
The idea was that they could map out the known universe and then study how different parts of the universe interacted with each other.
But the accuracy of the simulation has baffled them. The computer is able to come up with tweaks to the universe involving things like dark matter or black holes, without being given training data on what those things are to begin with.
‘It’s like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” said group leader Shirley Ho from the Flatiron Institute and who is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
‘Nobody knows how it does this, and it’s a great mystery to be solved.’
Moreover, the speed at which it is able to crunch through these calculations and come up with different scenarios is far beyond anything they’ve used before.
‘We can run these simulations in a few milliseconds, while other ‘fast’ simulations take a couple of minutes,’ Ho explains.
Computer-aided simulations like these have become vital to the field of theoretical astrophysics.
Scientists want to know how the cosmos might evolve under various scenarios, such as if the dark energy pulling the universe apart varied over time. Such studies require running thousands of simulations, making a lightning-fast and highly accurate computer model one of the major objectives of modern astrophysics.
The D3M model certainly fits that target, and Ho’s team (which has presented the tool in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is now working to understand its nuances.
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