Claude Unsupervised for Days Cracks Nine-Loop Scattering Amplitude, Verified by Record Holder
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-09-26
Anthropic reports Claude (Fable 5.1 on the ClaudeScience platform) ran nearly unsupervised for days to compute the nine-loop six-particle scattering amplitude in planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills, breaking the eight-loop record set by SLAC's Lance Dixon in 2023, with Dixon personally verifying the result.
- Started from an open challenge by physicist-blogger Matt von Hippel: solve a frontier amplitude problem on academic-grade compute
- Only one task prompt was given; follow-up guidance was essentially "keep going"; Claude wrote all Python/SymPy code itself and solved it via both bootstrap and the form-factor route
- Total cost $1-2K, with the symbolic computation portion only $100 (96 CPUs for a week)
- Dixon notes the computation is fragile—one error collapses everything—and that Claude understands his team's papers better than anyone but co-authors
- A CAS team led by Song He independently reached most of the nine-loop result days later, publishing symbol data on Zenodo, using GPT-6 only for auxiliary constraints
- von Hippel's takeaway: no new methods, but "the low-hanging fruit is more plentiful than expected"—AI can now reliably do this class of precise scientific computation
Related event: Claude Breaks Nine-Loop Physics Record, Scooping Human Team(27 posts)→
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