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Friday, October 08, 2021

Using AI in Particle Physics

An old interest of mine, how can AI be applied?   An investigation.  A further question:  How can AI be used generally elsewhere as a means to 'drill' into a complex space, with known rules,  play with their testing and extension?     ... 

Using AI to Drill Down in Physics  By Bennie Mols, Commissioned by CACM Staff, July 8, 2021

If a computer can teach itself to play the age-old board game Go better than the human world champion, if a computer can even conjure up a genius new Go move, couldn't a computer also discover new physics?

Jesse Thaler, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), investigates the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in particle physics. In 2020, Thaler also became the director of the National Science Foundation's AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), which is dedicated to advancing physics knowledge and galvanizing AI research innovation.

At the moment, the Standard Model of particle physics is the best description of three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and of a large family of elementary particles. Finding deviations from the Standard Model might lead physicists to discover new particles or new interactions, and AI might be able to play an important role in this.

In a Zoom interview, Thaler talks about the present and the future of applying AI to particle physics.

Why does particle physics need AI?

Particle physics is a data-rich field. In CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), particles collide every 25 nanoseconds. Processing and analyzing these collisions has to be done in an automated and robust way. We are seeing now that our traditional tools have reached their limits. AI has the potential to exploit new features of these datasets."

Where are we right now with AI in particle physics?

Right now, AI has augmented and improved on strategies that particle physics has already used for many decades. AI gives physicists a better ability to reconstruct particles from the collision debris and interpret the results.

What type of AI is used in particle physics?

It's almost all machine learning, and the biggest distinction to make is between supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Thus far in particle physics, we have focused on supervised learning, based on training sets with labeled data.  ... '

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