In 2012, Moore left the University of New Mexico and became full-time resident faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
[1][3] In 1993, Moore found a novel solution to the three-body problem, showing that it is possible in Newtonian mechanics for three equal-mass bodies to follow each other around a shared orbit along a figure-eight shaped curve.
Later researchers showed that similar solutions to the three-body problem are also possible under general relativity, Einstein's more accurate description of the effects of gravitation on moving bodies.
In work with Aaron Clauset, David Kempe, and Dimitris Achlioptas, Moore showed that the appearance of power laws in the degree distribution of networks can be illusory: network models such as the Erdős–Rényi model, whose degree distribution does not obey a power law, may nevertheless appear to exhibit one when measured using traceroute-like tools.
[13][14][15][16] Other topics in Moore's research include modeling undecidable problems by physical systems,[17][18] phase transitions in random instances of the Boolean satisfiability problem,[19] the unlikelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence due to the indistinguishability of advanced signaling technologies from random noise,[20][21][22] the inability of certain types of quantum algorithm to solve graph isomorphism,[23] and attack-resistant quantum cryptography.