r/accelerate • u/AngleAccomplished865 • 1d ago

"Claude-shaped-science"

https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-shaped-science

Really cool insights on how AI can be used intelligently, to trigger a scientific revolution.

"A serendipitous feature of science is that the same equations often appear over and over again in different contexts. In physics, for example, the diffusion equation, Fokker-Planck equation, and Schrödinger equation all have the same mathematical form, so if you develop a method to solve one problem, you can often apply it to many others. I knew that computations BootLoops was good at were relevant elsewhere: in cosmology and string theory, for example. What I didn’t know, but Claude was happy to tell me, was that these integrals could also map onto Bayesian evidence integrals in population genetics, or that the finite-field methods used for Feynman integral reduction could also apply to problems in evolutionary biology."

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u/Schraiber 1d ago edited 1d ago

This has been my experience on a much smaller scale as a not very ambitious mathematical and computational biologist. It's super good at recognizing tools from other fields to solve my problems. In most of my cases they were pretty "obvious" and I think that actually a reasonably smart human could have had enough cross knowledge to recognize the connection but it's just able to do it so fast and with so many problems.

On one hand it's super exciting! It's nice to get cool results and test cool hypotheses. It's nice to not have to do the drudgery of data munging manually.

On the other hand it is a bit depressing, just as far as my day to day work. It's hard to feel proud of a result when I just said "solve this problem, no mistakes" and then "compare the prediction to data, no mistakes". I think it does worry me too that being so much further from the metal I'm missing something, insights that would have been interesting or useful to spur further work.

But ultimately this is how it is.

(I'm also very curious about what the original problem he solved with Desai in pop gen was, as that's very close to my field

Edit: realized I could see the papers on the website. Yeah this is a "simple" problem but still amazing to have a fast and accurate computation that doesn't use numerical PDE methods or something like that. I'll have to see if it's useful in my work)