Artificial Intelligence

A quantum trick helps trim bloated AI models

Tensor networks grapple with the complexities of both quantum particles and machine learning

A 3-D of multi-colored balls connected by small, cylindrical tubes.

Illustration by Hawaii

By Emily Conover

A hunk of material bustles with electrons, one tickling another as they bop around. Quantifying how one particle jostles others in that scrum is so complicated that, beginning in the 1990s, physicists developed an esoteric mathematical structure called a tensor network just to describe it.