Anthropic reports that Claude solved a nine-loop calculation in the planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills model, surpassing the previous eight-loop record set by Lance Dixon and collaborators.
The quoted post says Claude ran largely unsupervised for days in Claude Science using a single prompt, at a total cost of a few thousand dollars, and Dixon independently verified the result.
Kevin Weil's own text praises the achievement and expects AI to advance high energy physics over the coming 12 months.
The quoted Anthropic post gives a concrete benchmark: Claude ran for days to reach nine loops, extending the previous eight-loop record in a physics model.
Nine loop calculations in N=4 Super Yang-Mills! Lance Dixon's 8-loop calculation was mind boggling when he did it. I calculated a lot of Feynman diagrams in grad school and this is 🤯
Will be amazing to see where AI will take high energy physics in the coming 12 months.
New on the Science Blog: Yes, Claude can do Nine Loops. Theoretical physicists predict how particles behave using formulas called scattering amplitudes. These are notoriously hard to compute, so researchers work with layers of increasingly fine corrections called “loops”—each added loop makes the answer more precise but takes exponentially more computation. Most calculations stop at two or three loops. Eight loops was the previous record in a simplified model physicists use as a testing ground (planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills), set by SLAC's Lance Dixon and collaborators. Last month, physicist and science writer @4gravitons issued a challenge: could an AI push past eight loops in this model, using only the compute budget an academic could reasonably access? Given a single prompt describing the nine-loop problem, Claude ran largely unsupervised for days in Claude Science and solved it using methods developed by Dixon and his colleagues, at a total cost of a few thousand dollars. Dixon independently verified the result, and von Hippel wrote about the experience for our blog. Read more: https://www.anthropic.com/research/yes-claude-can-do-nine-loopsView quoted post on X
Source: Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 · x.comPublished · added here
