{"paper":{"title":"Learning with springs and sticks","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Al\\'an Aspuru-Guzik, Luis Mantilla Calder\\'on","submitted_at":"2025-08-26T13:26:26Z","abstract_excerpt":"Learning is a physical process. Here, we aim to study a simple dynamical system composed of springs and sticks capable of arbitrarily approximating any continuous function. The main idea of our work is to use the sticks to mimic a piecewise-linear approximation of the given function, use the potential energy of springs to encode a desired mean squared error loss function, and converge to a minimum-energy configuration via dissipation. We apply the proposed simulation system to regression tasks and show that its performance is comparable to that of multi-layer perceptrons. In addition, we study"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.19015","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2508.19015/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}