Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#61

Post by twic » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #36

Am I the only one that never reads these articles but just goes straight to the comments? It seems like reporters always get the facts bungled and go for the simple story - out of necessity of course.

I also do this. HN comment pages are extremely varied in their quality, but they do tend to be good at shooting down articles which aren't as good as their titles suggest. Plus, HN loads fast. So, open the comments, check to see if the article might be worth reading, and if so, open it, flip back to the main page while the article loads.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#62

Post by _FKS_ » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #13

I think their universal quantum computer (to be announced later this year) could accelerate fusion research even more, as I imagine it could more accurately simulate the atom reactions and experiments on it. Practical quantum computers may just be what we were missing to finally be able build working fusion reactors. The millions of possible "solutions" and algorithms for working fusion reactors may be what has made…

Even if you had the computing power AND if you were simulating your fusion reactor's plasma in realtime, while it's running AND you know/can predict the plasma instabilities in realtime (under a few ms), you still need a way to "counter" those instabilites in the said plasma. And you need to counter fast, before the instability "poisons" the entire plasma, something that should happen within a few ms. If you don't, your entire experiment stops, and it takes a while to get it back (minutes). Currently: 1. nobody really understands the instabilities, why and when they happen; 2. there's no way to 'counter' them. So it's not only about the computing power.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#63

Post by noobermin » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #60

abefetterman wrote: post #16

This is actually a really exciting development to me. (Note, what is exciting is the "optometrist algorithm" from the paper [1] not necessarily googles involvement as pitched in the guardian). Typically a day of shots would need to be programmed out in advance, typically scanning over one dimension (out of hundreds) at a time. It would then take at least a week to analyze the results and create an updated research pl…

Perhaps a stupid question, but why can't the whole experiment be run as a simulation?

The system is fundamentally 6^N dimensional with N~10^23.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#64

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #10

EternalData wrote: post #4

Google might try to become the conglomerate of all forward-facing things but it is somewhat funny to see how through it all, it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business.

> it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business. You'd think the advertising staff would get pretty good treatment at Google. Do they?

when I worked in the ads part, it was not glamorous (as compared to search, or mobile, or social, or whatever the hot area was at the time) but I think we were treated well, and acknowledged for running a critical service that provided revenue that allowed other parts of the company to do research and development into new things.

I can't speak for the entire advertising staff, of course.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#65

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #36

Am I the only one that never reads these articles but just goes straight to the comments? It seems like reporters always get the facts bungled and go for the simple story - out of necessity of course.

I often jump straight to comments, but I think Google's blog post for this is required reading: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/07/so-there-i-was-firin...

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#66

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

siscia wrote: post #34

I do have a naive question. Suppose a big breakthrough comes out of a private company, and such innovation is necessary to use nuclear fusion. The company will be free to do whatever it pleases with the technology or it will somehow "force" to let other use, maybe behind the payment of some royalties.

yep. They could keep it a trade secret (no patent), patent it and not license it, or patent it and license it so others could use it under some terms.

This only matters for the life of the patent, and is consistent with the intent of patents.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#67

Post by noobermin » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

abefetterman wrote: post #37

jlarocco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a complete outsider, I don't understand what's special about the "optometrist algorithm." As described in the Nature article it's just hill climbing using humans as the evaluation function. Isn't it basically the same thing they were already doing but more granular?

Basically nobody was using automated gradient descent / etc because of the proclivity of these algorithms to get stuck on a boundary. The problem is the boundaries are not well defined. One example might be a catastrophic instability. If it gets triggered it has the potential to damage the machine. But the exact parameters in which the instability occurs are not well known. So with this algorithm you mix the best of…

I am still very skeptical that a human is really that good at avoiding the problem areas, although they might be marginally better. Plus, they don't seem to claim that anywhere in the paper, instead, they just rated shots as either "better" or"just as good", ie., a local evaluation which won't let you avoid such areas, which of course is a judgement that requires more knowledge than just the conditions in the neighborhood of the current reference.

The only thing I think that can lead someone to your conclusion is they can judge based on a host of criteria, not just a pre-defined set of criteria--may be that's what you meant. Of course, intuitively, changing your criteria midstream would lead to bias in your judgement, I'd think, but that may be the real innovation here, that is hard to do without a human judge in the mix.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#68

Post by efm » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

lamp_book wrote: post #20

From the actual journal article: > Two additional complications arise because plasma fusion apparatuses are experimental and one-of-a-kind. First, the goodness metric for plasma is not fully established and objective: some amount of human judgement is required to assess an experiment. Second, the boundaries of safe operation are not fully understood: it would be easy for a fully-automated optimisation algorithm to pr…

Hot or not, but for dynamical systems optimization.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#69

Post by suzzer99 » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #52

suzzer99 wrote: post #36

Am I the only one that never reads these articles but just goes straight to the comments? It seems like reporters always get the facts bungled and go for the simple story - out of necessity of course.

for me it is about page loading - pretty much straightforward successful and predictable on HN and slow and/or heavy, jerking current position/scroll around and full of whatever else surprises the page of the source. I want to know what it is about immediately, i.e. basically it is an issue of instant gratification for me :) If information on the HN comments page isn't enough (which is rare), or the source is really…

I bet you love usatoday.com.

Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm

#70

Post by noobermin » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #59

ouid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does one climb a hill with no gradient? [serious question]

You can climb a hill without knowing the gradient, so long as you can compare two points in terms of height. You randomly move in some direction, then compare the new point to the old point, go to whichever of them is higher, and repeat. This sounds like what the experimenters are doing. Perhaps the GP was alluding to "first order hill climbing" as evaluating the gradient in every direction and climbing the steepest…

That is exactly what they're doing. See the section on Exploratory Technique, second to last paragraph. As I said above, the possible innovation here is they can change midstream the criteria one uses to decide what is a "better shot".