The First AI Universe Simulator's Unexpected Ability Surprises Scientists

A research team recently initiated the first artificial intelligence (AI) universe simulator in the world. What AI can do and know about the universe even makes its researchers surprised.

Computer simulations have been used to try as well as digitally reverse-engineer our universe’s origin and evolution for many decades. It takes minutes for the combination of the traditional methods and modern technology and the results are feasible. Besides, with the AI universe simulator, these results are much more accurate in the very short time of milliseconds.

As stated by the research team’s paper:

It is interesting to say that the simulator does not only complete greatly its duty of simulating the universe’s evolution under a variety of gravitational conditions, as the aim of its developers. On the other hand, it also gives exact outcomes for variables which it did not receive training before. For instance, the scientists were surprised with the specific parameter on the quantity of dark matter within the universe the simulation produces.

The team said that Deep Density Displacement Model (D3M) system was not provided with training data in dark matter amounts. However, the AI, in an inexplicable way, exactly modified the values due to its inferences from other training.

In the conversation with Phys.Org, study coauthor Shirley Ho stated:

The simulator does not only help further demonstrate artificial intelligent black box’s nature of changeability and unpredictability as well as deep learning but also contributes to filling in some blanks in the backstory of our universe.

The place we are living is a mostly unknown and strange universe. It is just people’s beginning to see out of the observable space and study thing out there together with the way it ended up. AI plays an important role in helping people understand exactly the role of billions of variables, which affect our universe’s evolution, in the appearance of planets, stars, and life.

The AI’s developers are the research paper’s lead author Suyi He and coauthor Shirley Ho from the Flatiron Institute and Carnegie Mellon University together with coauthors UC Berkeley’s Yu Feng and Yin Li who also worked in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Flatiron Institute’s Wei Chen, Siamak Ravanbakhsh - an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Barnabás Póczos.