71–80 of 129 posts
Sounds like some promising results, hopefully this approach will continue to be useful. Addressing the wider article, it always surprises me that the focus fusion approach is never mentioned in fusion articles put out by the mainstream media. I don't know what to attribute that to, but it's surprising that one of the most promising fusion approaches is constantly overlooked. To give an idea how drastically overlooked…
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…
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.
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?
Those are the reasons why string-theorist will not (and should not) get any Nobel price in the next decades. Since its predictions are hard to measure on those small scales there's no way of telling if the model is any good until it is compared against suitable experimental data.
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-o...
Even the title "optometrist algorithm" is telling, because that paradigm is a basic model for how a lot of testing is done, except that it's not the optometrist doing it, it's a computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
is it picking a new configuration at random, or does it still have to be "close" to the last configuration?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps a stupid question, but why can't the whole experiment be run as a simulation?
Even if this would be the dream of a lot of theoretical physicists to replace experiments with simulations, this must not happen! Ever! Even if every complex system in the world could be simulated in reasonable time it would still require experiments to verify or falsify the simulation results. A simulation is essentially just a calculation from a model someone came up with to describe a system. In order to check how…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps a stupid question, but why can't the whole experiment be run as a simulation?
Even if this would be the dream of a lot of theoretical physicists to replace experiments with simulations, this must not happen! Ever! Even if every complex system in the world could be simulated in reasonable time it would still require experiments to verify or falsify the simulation results. A simulation is essentially just a calculation from a model someone came up with to describe a system. In order to check how…