[Phys-l] Eureqa

[brian whatcott <betwys1@sbcglobal.net>]

Wanna be a first rank discoverer?

Here's one approach: take a compound pendulum.
 Mount an angle sensor  and an angular velocity sensor on each of the 
two legs.
 Capture the behavior of this chaotic compound pendulum.
Feed it to an equation-making genetic algorithm,
 figured for predicting time series.
In a day it came up with this:

for...   L1, L2 lengths of the pendula.
m1,m2 the masses of the pendula.
omega1 omega2 angular velocities of the pendula
theta1 theta2 the angle to the vertical of each pendulum.

Result:
L1^2(m1 + m2)omega1^2 + m2L2^2omega2^2 +
m2L1L2omega1omega2 cos(theta1 - theta2) -
19.6L1(m1 + m2)costheta1 - 19.6m2L2costheta2 = constant.

In order, this describes the kinetic energy of the top arm,
 theKE of the bottom arm, then the potential energy of the top arm,
 then thePE of the bottom arm.

Pretty cute? If you are trying to make sense of complex data
 relations, and maybe have an idea of some ruling equations,
you might want to download this Cornell freebee

http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/eureqa

...and get famous!   :-)

Schmidt & Lipson Science vol 324, p81 (2009)
New Scientist March 19, 2011 p40-43

Thousands of satisfied users already...
It finds invariant laws.

Brian W