physical

Definition

Marks that real objects and real forces are involved, not just pixels or text. It appears in physical world, physical interaction, physical AI — the vocabulary of robotics and embodied systems, where a policy has to survive friction, latency, and sensor noise. Distinguish it from physics-based, which describes a model that encodes physical laws internally rather than a setting that takes place in reality.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Code as Worlds — An Agent That Writes the World Down as Runnable CodeCode as Worlds: Agentic Discovery of Executable World Representations for Physical Reasoning
• Paper walkthrough: Zetta ζ — a robot harness that repairs itself mid-execution, with the policy frozenZetta $ζ$: An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence
• Paper Walkthrough: PhiZero — A World Model That Reasons in a Language of Physics Before It RendersPhiZero: A World Model Built Around Physical Language