In a week and for about $2,000, Claude computed a nine-loop particle scattering amplitude, a problem where physicists stopped at eight loops
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A calculation that took the strongest physicists years, SI did in a week for the price of a laptop. Fundamental science is becoming accessible to small teams, and, according to von Hippel, there are still plenty of easy wins in physics.
In August, former theoretical physicist Matt von Hippel challenged SI companies to solve one of the field's big open problems on a university lab's budget. Anthropic physicists Liam Fitzpatrick and Siddharth Mishra-Sharma gave Claude (Fable 5.1 in Claude Science) a single instruction: compute the six-particle amplitude in planar N=4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory at nine loops; the record, eight loops, was set by Lance Dixon in 2023. The model wrote the code from scratch on its own and computed the result by two independent methods that agreed on all 107,053 coefficients; it took about a week on 96 processors and $1,000–2,000. Dixon spent two weeks checking and confirmed the result; in parallel, a group led by Song He at the Chinese Academy of Sciences obtained the same result with GPT-6.
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