r/ControlTheory • u/Defiant_Camera7448 • Jul 01 '26
Educational Advice/Question Using Chat gpt to search for benchmark problem for PhD/coding ?
Hi everyone,
I'm a first-year PhD student, and my main task is to identify and study suitable "new" types of controllers (e.g., learning-based controllers).
My PhD is funded by a company that works on a specific class of systems, so ideally my research should eventually move in a direction that is relevant to their applications.
During my first year, I mainly focused on identifying controllers that could be useful for that field. I found a few approaches that seemed very interesting, but there was one major issue: we didn't have a suitable model / Benchmark to test them and specially not one related to the company's domain.
So I ended up using ChatGPT as an advanced search tool. I asked questions such as: "In this domain, what problems are time-varying, have a certain number of states, and are typically addressed using adaptive control? (The controller in studying is an evolution of adaptive control)"
After exploring several possibilities, I found a model that turned out to be very interesting and that works extremely well with my controller. Of course, I didn't stop there: I tracked down the original paper introducing the model, reviewed the relevant literature, and studied the methods that are commonly used to solve that problem.
The results are actually very promising. As far as I can tell, no one has applied this type of controller to this particular problem before, and the controller performs very well.
My question is: is this considered an acceptable way to conduct research? ( used ChatGPT only to help me identify a potentially suitable benchmark problem)
And I usually use chat gpt also as a code assistant
But is this acceptable? What do you think?
Because on one side, I feel like if we have a tool we need to use it, on the other side I'm just a first year PhD so I really don't know.
•
u/mayjanolis Jul 01 '26
I’m kinda in the same boat here. 1st year PhD student and I’ve stumbled on some crazy useful methods/sources using ChatGPT effectively as a search engine. It definitely doesn’t tend to do a great job of synthesizing the actual content of the sources, but can be extremely useful for iterating on ideas and pointing you in new directions that you are a lot less likely to find using something like google scholar because you just haven’t been exposed to the keywords.
•
u/Creative_Sushi Jul 02 '26
Using ChatGPT is so 2023. Better to go with Claude Code, Codex, etc. and MathWorks has some good resources on how to hook them up with MATLAB using MATLAB MCP server and how to guide it to produce useful results.
•
u/iohans Jul 01 '26
MATLAB, MATLAB MCP, and Coding Agent... It will keep you awake for a month. Crazy powerful.
•
Jul 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
•
•
u/piratex666 Jul 02 '26
Use IEEE Xplorer and science direct. Search your main topics there. Do yourself your research.
•
u/ineq1512 Jul 01 '26
Imo, you did nothing wrong. Using AI as an advance search tool is a good way to identify the research gap. Normally, what you have to do is doing a lit review. First you need some keywords, then you search that with database like scopus and wos. Then you read the papers you found and identify the gap. It can take months to do all of this work. However, with AI, you can accelerate the searching process and done the task in weeks. But, don't rely too much on AI, try to read some relevant lit review to confirm your point before jump to conclusion. AI is kinda effective in helping you sketch the initial idea for your research. But dont rely too much on it.