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Can computers think? They can certainly calculate - with staggering speed and ever-increasing power - and they have driven scientific and technological advances that would have been impossible without them. Even so, we would like to believe that, for some puzzles, there's no substitute for old-fashioned human intuition. But this view may be changing.

A new breed of machine learning algorithms have begun knocking down cognitive milestones that, until recently, scientists believed were still decades away. Major advances are being made in computer vision, language translation, autonomous robotic action, and other complex applications. At the same time, these new algorithms are helping scientists accelerate discovery in physics.

This stunning progress poses as many questions as answers: What are the fundamental possibilities and limits of machine learning? Can we create true human-level artificial intelligence, and how might its thoughts differ from our own? What new breeds of computer will fuel artificial intelligence and, conversely, how will artificial intelligence enable new forms of computing?

In his public lecture at Perimeter Institute, Roger Melko will explore how computers have helped humanity solve increasingly complex puzzles, and ask which challenges, if any, only human intuition is equipped to tackle.

The surprising success of learning with deep neural networks poses two fundamental challenges: understanding why these networks work so well and what this success tells us about the nature of intelligence and our biological brain. Our recent Information Theory of Deep Learning shows that large deep networks achieve the optimal tradeoff between training size and accuracy, and that this optimality is achieved through the noise in the learning process.

In this talk, I will focus on the statistical physics aspects of our theory and the interaction between the stochastic dynamics of the training algorithm (Stochastic Gradient Descent) and the phase structure of the Information Bottleneck problem. Specifically, I will describe the connections between the phase transition and the final location and representation of the hidden layers, and the role of these phase transitions in determining the weights of the network.

Based partly on joint works with Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Noga Zaslavsky, and Shlomi Agmon.

Two years ago the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

(LIGO) announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves; minute distortions in space-time caused by cataclysmic events far away in the universe.  Very recently, the merger of a binary neutron star system was detected by both of the Advanced LIGO detectors and the Advanced Virgo detector in Italy, triggering a massive follow-up campaign by ground and space-based telescopes.  A counterpart to the gravitational-wave source was located, and transient emission was detected from gamma rays to radio.  I will talk about the sources of the signals we detected, the physics behind the detectors, and prospects for the future of this emerging field.

CHIME is a new interferometric telescope at radio frequencies 400-800 MHz.The mapping speed (or total statistical power) of CHIME is among the largestof any radio telescope in the world, and the technology powering CHIME could be used to build telescopes which are orders of magnitude more powerful.This breakthrough sensitivity has the power to revolutionize radio astronomy, but meeting the computational challenges will require breakthroughs on the algorithmic side.  I'll give a status update on CHIME, with an emphasis on new algorithms developed at Perimeter to search for fast radio bursts (FRB's) and pulsars.

Diamond anvil cells and shock techniques now permit the study of matter under multimegabar (i.e. several hundred GPa) pressures. The properties of matter in this pressure regime differ drastically from those known at 1 atm. Just how different physics and chemistry are at high pressure and the role that a chemical intuition for bonding and structure can have in understanding matter at high pressures will be explored in this lecture. I will discuss in detail an overlapping hierarchy of responses to increased density, consisting of (a) squeezing out van der Waals space (for molecular crystals); (b) increasing coordination; (c) decreasing the bond length of covalent bonds and the size of anions; and (d) an extreme regime of electrons moving off atoms and new modes of correlation. Examples of the startling chemistry and physics that emerge under such extreme conditions will alternate in this account with qualitative chemical ideas about the bonding involved.