AI meets physics: a comprehensive survey

Uncovering the mechanisms of physics is driving a new paradigm in artificial intelligence (AI) discovery. Today, physics has enabled us to understand the AI paradigm in a wide range of matter, energy, and space-time scales through data, knowledge, priors, and laws. At the same time, the AI paradigm also draws on and introduces the knowledge and laws of physics to promote its own development. Then this new paradigm of using physical science to inspire AI is the physical science of artificial intelligence (PhysicsScience4AI, PS4AI). Although AI has become the driving force for development in various fields, there is still a “black box” phenomenon that is difficult to explain in the field of AI deep learning. This article will briefly review the connection between relevant physics disciplines (classical mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical physics, quantum mechanics) and AI. It will focus on discussing the mechanisms of physics disciplines and how they inspire the AI deep learning paradigm, and briefly introduce some related work on how AI solves physics problems. PS4AI is a new research field. At the end of the article, we summarize the challenges facing the new physics-inspired AI paradigm and look forward to the next generation of artificial intelligence technology. This article aims to provide a brief review of research related to physics-inspired AI deep algorithms and to stimulate future research and exploration by elucidating recent advances in physics.