Three’s a crowd Pitris/Getty

A notorious maths problem first posed by Isaac Newton may be getting closer to a solution thanks to artificial intelligence. The three-body problem – the question of how three objects orbit one another under their own gravity – has baffled physicists and mathematicians for more than 300 years, but it turns out a neural network can find solutions remarkably quickly.

The three-body problem is difficult because it is a chaotic system, meaning it requires an extremely precise understanding of where the three objects start. For these systems, the “butterfly effect” comes into play – even a tiny error could result in an entirely …