Physical sciences
AI in physics, chemistry, astronomy and the study of the Earth.
6 milestones
GNoME predicts 2.2 million crystal structures, and the claim is disputed
Google DeepMind published GNoME in Nature on 29 November 2023, reporting 2.2 million predicted crystal structures of which 381,000 were judged stable, and describing this as an order of magnitude expansion in the stable materials known. A companion paper from Berkeley Lab reported a robotic laboratory synthesising 41 of the predicted compounds.
GraphCast forecasts ten days of global weather in under a minute
Google DeepMind published GraphCast in Science on 14 November 2023. Trained on about forty years of reanalysis data, it predicts hundreds of atmospheric variables ten days ahead at quarter-degree resolution, and beat the European Centre's operational forecast on 90 per cent of 1,380 verification targets. A forecast that takes hours on a supercomputer takes it under a minute.
Pangu-Weather is the first learned model to beat operational forecasting
Bi and colleagues at Huawei Cloud published Pangu-Weather in Nature on 5 July 2023. Trained on 39 years of recorded atmospheric data, it was the first machine-learned model reported to beat the operational numerical forecast on accuracy as well as speed, producing a global forecast in about 1.4 seconds on one graphics processor.
Milad Abolhasani and colleagues demonstrated Artificial Chemist 2.0, an autonomous flow chemistry platform for quantum dot synthesis
In December 2020, Milad Abolhasani's group at North Carolina State University published Artificial Chemist 2.0, an autonomous flow chemistry system combining machine learning with robotic synthesis to navigate a space of approximately 20 million quantum dot formulations and produce a target material within roughly 30 minutes of initiating a search.
D-Wave Systems Announces D-Wave One, a 128-Qubit Quantum Annealing Computer Available for Commercial Purchase
In May 2011, D-Wave Systems announced the D-Wave One, a 128-qubit quantum annealing processor codenamed Rainier, marketed as the first commercially available quantum computer. Lockheed Martin purchased a system for approximately US $10 million, making it the first known commercial transaction for a quantum computing system.
DENDRAL Project, Stanford University
Beginning in 1965, Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan, and Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University launched the DENDRAL project, a computer program designed to infer molecular structure from mass spectrometry data, becoming one of the earliest programs to encode specialist scientific knowledge as explicit rules.