In Michael Crichton’s Prey [1], a cloud of nano-robots escapes human control and becomes something far more unsettling than a machine. It stretches, contracts, reorganizes, and even hunts. It behaves like a living swarm endowed with a form of collective intelligence, even though no single unit possesses a brain (see Striking image). The story was fiction, yet it captured an idea that has become increasingly important in complexity science. When many simple agents interact locally, complex and sometimes surprising behavior can emerge at the level of the group.
It is not too long ago since generative AI tools, such as ChatGTP, were being discussed within Arts and Humanities for their ability to generate good quality essays with seemingly no easy or reliable method of detecting their use, but quantitative subjects like physics seemed immune. AI tools did not seem to be very good at solving problems, and as problem solving in all its forms is a huge part of a sound physics education, generative AI did not seem to pose much of a threat. Those days are no more. Generative AI can now solve pretty much any problem we might set to an undergraduate and we face the same challenges that beset our colleagues in the Arts and Humanities.
We asked Prof. Dr. Doris Reiter, research group leader in theoretical solid-state physics at the Technical University Dortmund and Organizer of the Outreach Project QuanTour, to tell us something about her choices and her career. Doris Reiter received last year EPS Emmy Noether Distinction in recognition of her ground-breaking contributions to theoretical photonics and quantum technology, her transformative leadership and innovative outreach.
