No, they have not. They developed a very useful new program.
But simple assisted hill climbing is not a new algorithm, you might call it "Wizard" though. This would attract the right audience.
Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
111–120 of 129 posts
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
6*N, yes. Pretty bad mistake there. But yes, even if you don't model every particle and restrict yourself to "parcels" of fluid like in most simulations, you still have a very difficult problem.
Okay, this is really showing my ignorance but why 6? You start off with 4 (3 space plus one time (ignoring 11-dimensional space-time)) and add which dimensions exactly? Can the individual interactions between wave/particles be reduced to 2 dimensions? Aren't they going to interact along the whole range of forces they exert: gravitational, weak, electromagnetic, strong?
3 dimensions for position + 3 dimensions for speed
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#113Earlier 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…
If you're doing science, experiments are hugely important. If you're doing engineering and you're reasonably sure that the physics guys came up with a good model, having everything in a computer would make development a lot cheaper.
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#114This 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…
Though this work may seem exciting, there is an existing, respected body of work available on how to mathematically structure a search over a large parameter space and how to mathematically interpret experimental responses. That body of work is a subset of applied statistics called design of experiments. It helps scientists avoid the common failures that result from doing exactly what was done here, random space expl…
It would not surprise me if high-tech companies are inventing new, useful things in this field.
In my career as first a scientist and then an engineer, I've found very few practical users of highly technical experimental design theory, and all of them were in industry. These algorithms move about intelligently along all dimensions of some search space, whereas in the lab we prefered to turn just one knob at a time.
One reason is that the algorithms are optimally seraching for "known unknowns" -- that is they assume they roughly understand the problem. The lab is a world of unkown unknowns where the more plodding, understandable protocols tend to be safer.
But in industry, some problems are of the known-unknowns type. And experiment runs can burn up seriously expensive hardware time. So it makes sense for fusion researchers and cloud-computing giants a like to invent new practical ways to optimise searches.
Besides, optimising searches is what Googlers are for.
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#115I 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.
A related economics question, a thought experiment really... Suppose a private company manages to lower the cost of electric energy by 90%, using a device self produced fast with virtually no capex. From an economics point of view, they build free money printing presses, essentially. How would they benefit from this the most possible? Selling the energy? At what price? Take over sectors of the economy where electric…
With costs that low, it'd make sense to replace even brand-new fossil plants just to save the cost of fuel. You could eliminate fossil fuels for electricity production in a very short period of time.
Selling the energy mostly wouldn't make sense, since it means replacing regulated utilities. You could sell the reactors themselves but you'd have to be good at scaling up factories fast; unless that's a core competency you'll probably make money faster by licensing to people who are good at it. Or, just outsource the manufacturing.
Either way, if you can churn out lots of reactors fast, just sell them to everyone. Don't bother trying to take over e.g. aluminum production; what do you know about producing aluminum? How long will it take you to learn? Just sell the reactor to the aluminum producer.
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite possibly, it never making any money at all but getting the world closer to usable fusion is an acceptable outcome for investors like Paul Allan. And it could make money by being the first ones to sell said product, decades in the future, or by at least holding valuable IP at that point?
one possible alternative would be to put the money into academic research so there is no pressure from investors to have a return on investment.
I'm not convinced that having no pressure to get a return on investment is a net benefit. I've seen arguments by fusion scientists that the field has historically been much too focused on pure plasma physics, with too little emphasis on practical results or on the economics of reactor designs.
People invest in Tri Alpha because if things work out, a practical reactor is more like one decade in the future, and it would be very economical. The return on investment would be enormous.
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps a stupid question, but why can't the whole experiment be run as a simulation?
Because fusion simulations are really hard. This simulation[1] took 15 million hours of CPU time to model a cubic cm of plasma. The results were used to update 5 scalar parameters in a model. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2016/heat-loss-fusion-reactors-0121
Does anyone have an idea about what software they use to simulate this stuff?
I'm wondering if they can even make use of the newfound GPU power or are just going ahead with ancient CPU based software because too much work has already been put in.
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because fusion simulations are really hard. This simulation[1] took 15 million hours of CPU time to model a cubic cm of plasma. The results were used to update 5 scalar parameters in a model. [1] http://news.mit.edu/2016/heat-loss-fusion-reactors-0121
Does anyone have an idea about what software they use to simulate this stuff? I'm wondering if they can even make use of the newfound GPU power or are just going ahead with ancient CPU based software because too much work has already been put in.
SpaceX is doing the best work on simulation. The adaptive multiscale work is a million times more important this moving to GPU, but of course they did that too:
https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/03/27/rockets-shake-and-ra...
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though this work may seem exciting, there is an existing, respected body of work available on how to mathematically structure a search over a large parameter space and how to mathematically interpret experimental responses. That body of work is a subset of applied statistics called design of experiments. It helps scientists avoid the common failures that result from doing exactly what was done here, random space expl…
Interesting. Are you able to provide some links to decent resources on this topic?
Re: Google and a nuclear fusion company have developed a new algorithm
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone have an idea about what software they use to simulate this stuff? I'm wondering if they can even make use of the newfound GPU power or are just going ahead with ancient CPU based software because too much work has already been put in.
SpaceX is doing the best work on simulation. The adaptive multiscale work is a million times more important this moving to GPU, but of course they did that too: https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/03/27/rockets-shake-and-ra...
Looks interesting. It looks like they are creating the CFD software for their own specific application. While that's cool and all, I doubt any other companies have the resources/motivation to write complex software from scratch, let alone underfunded postdocs.
I'm wondering about all the research that goes on in all the universities where large investments have been made on CPU based clusters. The simulation in the article you linked was run on NERSC servers, which are Cray supercomputers[1], which pretty much are Intel Xeon class servers with fancy interconnects.
So looks like it is CPU based, but I'm still interested in the software they use.