Open-source "BootLoops" harness supports AI models in performing precise scientific calculations

That's the takeaway from an Anthropic guest post by Prof. Matthew Schwartz, a physicist at Harvard University. He describes how he stopped trying to use Claude like a human researcher and instead started looking for "Claude-shaped problems," tasks that play to the strengths of today's AI models. Schwartz is also currently a visiting researcher at Anthropic.

That approach led to BootLoops, an open-source harness for exact scientific calculations. The source code is available on GitHub. Using the harness, Claude found connections between particle physics, ecology, population genetics, economics, and linguistics, according to Schwartz. But the results often only became scientifically valuable once domain experts stepped in to set the direction. Schwartz uses the concept of the "convex hull" to illustrate how AI can help in science.

Human knowledge is fragmented, with individual fields extending in different directions while the gaps between them go unexplored. A lab might spend 20 years studying one set of genes with a single method, leaving neighboring genes and alternative approaches untouched. An AI harness like BootLoops is supposed to fill those gaps by drawing connections…