Keplearn: Extract Equations from Data in Seconds

94 points by owls-on-wires 18 hours ago on hackernews | 11 comments

kamilstaszewski | 16 hours ago

Looks like it was written by human. Crazy

verdverm | 12 hours ago

Yup, I checked it out, some cool ideas in there. Owl and I were talking about our deterministic algos for SR under another recent HN post on SR, which seems to be having a small moment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171936

moussore | 11 hours ago

Is this a bot account? The unicode everywhere and comments indicates this was 100% vibe-coded...

seanhunter | 13 hours ago

Named after Kepler, who went from Tycho Brahe’s observational data to the laws of planetary motion (as mentioned in the article). But one really inspiring thing about Kepler is not mentioned there is that he started with a different theory and then changed his mind when the observational data showed he was wrong. We have the laws of planetary motion because of a feat of tremendous intellectual humility where a really smart person was prepared to admit that the theory they had invested a huge amount of time and effort into formulating didn’t match the observational data, _so they changed their mind_.

Kepler’s original theory was that the orbits in the solar system were defined by polygons and their inscribed/circumscribed spheres. This seemed very attractive because at that time they knew of 6 planetary bodies and this fitted in somehow (I don’t remember exactly) into this model with nested platonic solids and the spheres around them. Then Kepler realised that the predictions of this very elegant model were worse than the heliocentric model.

So when Brahe’s observations became available he basically threw all that out and started again, to develop his wonderfully elegant laws of planetary motion based around elliptical orbits which also have the significant benefits of predicting planetary motion beautifully and were later found to be entirely derivable from Newton’s laws of motion using calculus (there is a wonderful presentation of this derivation in Spivak for anyone who is interested).

likoya | 13 hours ago

He didn't even had a pocket calculator, and had to figure out the geometry without a concept of Cartesian representation.

seanhunter | 12 hours ago

This is Kepler's original theory, which is apparently the origin of the phrase "music of the spheres" btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterium_Cosmographicum

westurner | 11 hours ago

I have a faster solution for N-body gravity with orbital resonance that predicts the perihelion of Mercury than gravity from QED scattering, with Gr_C(2,4) in Lean 4 and Rust/WASM that I haven't yet published.

I noticed "Kepler" in the title and cool story about Kepler so now I'm mentioning it;

"Grassmannian Gravity from QED & Gauge Scattering Amplitudes: Complex Gr_C(2,4) Orbital Precession, Mercury's Perihelion, N-Body Dynamics, and Dilatant Dark Fluid (DDF) Unification in Lean 4" (2026) westurner/sustainablefactory/docs/grassmannian-gravity-from-qed-scattering-paper.md at main · westurner/sustainablefactory https://github.com/westurner/sustainablefactory/blob/main/do... :

> An arXiv-ready formal verification paper deriving planetary orbits, Mercury's 42.98 arcsec/century perihelion precession, and N-body gravitational dynamics from flat-space QED/gauge scattering amplitudes, BCJ double copy on Gr_C(2,4), and Dilatant Dark Fluid (DDF) hydrodynamics in Lean

There's already gravity that fits the Perihelion of Mercury from QED scattering (Partanen, M., and Tulkki, J. (2025). "Gravity Generated by Four One-Dimensional Unitary Gauge Symmetries and the Standard Model" / "Perihelion Precession of Planetary Orbits Solved from Quantum Field Theory"). FWIU, I've here contributed the use of Grassmanian Plückers and a Complex Grassmannian - GrC(2,4) both with and without connections to DDF Dilatant Dark Fluid (Fedi).

I had created a simple particle wave visualization tool with 3js and then on a whim AI-added a double slit and a detector screen, and I asked for Huygens-Steiner Parallel-Axis Intensity as the model to simulate superposition because of [Qian and Izadi] and then I had to keep working on that instead. First the model differencing in the simulator in JS to compare the difference in model predictions in the double-slit experiment against Pilot Wave Theory and Wigner function and then with Fraunhofer and Lean 4 and Rust and a crisp symbolic error term for each model of photonic and electronic superposition. It looks like GrC(2,4) is the most efficient model for photonic and electronic superposition, too.

"Huygens–Steiner Barycentric Coherence, Complex Gr_C(2,4) Plücker Channels, and Multi-Model Double-Slit & OAM Relative Predictive Error in Lean 4" (2026)

sustainablefactory/docs/grassmannian-huygens-double-slit-oam-paper.md at main · westurner/sustainablefactory https://github.com/westurner/sustainablefactory/blob/main/do... :

> An arXiv-ready formal verification paper uniting Qian–Izadi Huygens–Steiner parallel-axis coherence, complex Gr_C(2,4) Plücker double-slit interference, de Broglie–Bohm pilot-wave hydrodynamics, Wigner phase-space marginals, and Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) relative predictive error in Lean

Useful to create a devcontainer with lean4 and rust. Still working through verifying the URLs of each citation to publish some of this paper series per the latest terms for AI articles.

anigbrowl | 10 hours ago

Can you not?

The first line was intriguing but the rest of it is a mishmash of buzzwords and handwaving. It looks like you are bidding for consideration of a grand unified theory, and that's great, I am one of the people that enjoys considering new proposals that unify or align previously disconnected areas of physics or mathematics.

But even though I understood (most of) the individual assertions you are trying to cram into your abstract-of-an-abstract, showing which things you are combining, how you are combining them,and how you are keeping reproducibility and provability as your top priorities, the effect of trying to communicate so many data points at once comes off as earnest but incoherent, like a bus-stop conversation with a schizophrenic.

Ideas are not self-propagating. If you just want to feed your thoughts back into other AIs in a way that lets provide useful input toward an intellectual singularity, publish it on your own blog. If you are publishing it in a social space, take some time to articulate in plain language what you think you've found, why it's important, and why other people might find it worthwhile to invest some time in wrapping their heads around it. If that seems too vague go read some Quanta articles and ponder why they read a wider audience than hyper-technical abstracts in math journals.

westurner | 5 hours ago

I'm not finding this feedback to be helpful. I wish you luck with your own approach.

> incoherent, like a bus-stop conversation with a schizophrenic.

This is impolite and disrespectful. Do you have code or math to contribute? What tools could you use to interpret for example this the first sentence of my post?

> I have a faster solution for N-body gravity with orbital resonance that predicts the perihelion of Mercury than gravity from QED scattering, with Gr_C(2,4) in Lean 4 and Rust/WASM that I haven't yet published

joshmarlow | 12 hours ago

I bet this was fun to think about and build. Thank you for sharing!

westurner | 10 hours ago

How does TabPFN perform on the same data?

From "Show HN: TabPFN v2 – A SOTA foundation model for small tabular data" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650792 :

> Benchmark of tabpfn<2 compared to xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost