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: anthropic.com/research/yes-c…

Breaking math news: The first-ever 3D Einstein tile, an object that tiles space in a never-repeating pattern, has been found by independent researcher Ioannis Tsiokos using GPT Astra. Resembles a chair. Mathematicians have de-slopped the proof. @kkakaes: quantamagazine.org/updates/t…

Worrying about recursive self-improvement in 1996 is very impressive, but few know that George Eliot, of Middlemarch brilliance, wrote about the threat of RSI leading to human obsolescence way back in 1879 (!) She glimpsed this idea at the very start of the second industrial revolution, just by contemplating an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England. From "Shadows of the Coming Race":