{"id":244520,"date":"2026-09-26T13:06:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/claude-computes-a-nine-loop-amplitude-in-n4-super-yang-mills"},"modified":"2026-09-26T13:06:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:06:32","slug":"claude-computes-a-nine-loop-amplitude-in-n4-super-yang-mills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/claude-computes-a-nine-loop-amplitude-in-n4-super-yang-mills","title":{"rendered":"Claude computes a nine-loop amplitude in N=4 super-Yang-Mills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/claude-computes-a-nine-loop-amplitude-in-n4-super-yang-mills.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When a theoretical physicist challenged AI companies to solve one of particle physics\u2019 messiest calculation problems, he expected to prove LLMs had hit a wall. Instead, Claude handed him the answer four weeks later.<\/p>\n<p>Nine loops, 96 CPUs, and zero human supervision: How Claude solved a frontier problem in theoretical physics.<\/p>\n<p>The Challenge: Matt von Hippel, a former theoretical physicist and science writer, issued an open challenge to AI companies: use reasonable academic computational resources to solve a major outstanding problem in amplitudeology (a branch of particle physics). Specifically, calculate the nine-loop scattering amplitude for a toy model theory called N=4 super-Yang-Mills.<\/p>\n<p>* The Achievement: Anthropic researchers (Liam Fitzpatrick and Siddharth Mishra-Sharma) used a science harness running an advanced Claude model (Fable 5.1) to compute the six-particle amplitude at nine loops\u2014a complexity level previously unreached directly by human researchers.<\/p>\n<p>* How It Was Done:<\/p>\n<p>* The prompt given to the AI was simple: \u201cThe problem is to compute the Six-particle (hexagon) amplitude in planar N=4 SYM at nine loops.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* Claude operated almost entirely autonomously, running Python\/SymPy code and managing the workflow with basic prompts to keep working over several days.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/claude-computes-a-nine-loop-amplitude-in-n4-super-yang-mills\">Continue reading \u201cClaude computes a nine-loop amplitude in N=4 super-Yang-Mills\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a theoretical physicist challenged AI companies to solve one of particle physics\u2019 messiest calculation problems, he expected to prove LLMs had hit a wall. Instead, Claude handed him the answer four weeks later. Nine loops, 96 CPUs, and zero human supervision: How Claude solved a frontier problem in theoretical physics. The Challenge: Matt von [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,48,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}