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noname12011/07/20248 repliesview on HN

TIL: it's not just buzzwords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning


Replies

samsartor11/07/2024

My advisor also worked on this ML project for estimating electron density and temperature within tokomaks: https://www.cs.wm.edu/~ppeers/showPublication.php?id=Ozturk:...

Technically that counts as "AI in nuclear fusion", but it isn't any sort of breakthrough. In almost every case the effects of AI are marginal. Not zero exactly, but nowhere near the breathless hype.

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dekhn11/07/2024

When I used to work in grid computing almost 20 years ago, we were already running fusion experiments, realtime streaming the data to the grid, which would rapidly analyze it and compute some new parameters for the next run (I think they had a 20 minute downtime). I don't think it was considered machine learning at the time, though (and was certainly not deep learning as we practice it today).

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bbor11/07/2024

Fascinating! Reminds me of the new generation of AR headsets (eg Orion) that are making the impossible possible simply by adding an ANN(-derived) layer above some their of device controllers. I wonder how many problems will fundamentally change in the face of mature brute-forcing techniques…

sva_11/07/2024

Very interesting if you consider life as a complex chemical reaction that tries to self-sustain.

rajnathani11/08/2024

AI is not a buzzword, try beating Go without machine learning. Just ignore the whole enterprise speak, and you'll see a lot of really cool things which are possible almost only by means of neural nets.

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HPsquared11/07/2024

Neural networks have been used in industrial process control for many years. This is just another industrial control problem, perhaps a difficult one.

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madaxe_again11/08/2024

Yeah, this is precisely the kind of stuff I was talking about 48 hours ago, when everyone was telling me that ML will never find any kind of practical application.

There are so many fundamental fields - engineering, chemistry, biology, physics - which stand to have absolute quantum leaps in knowledge and capability with this technology.

jacoblambda11/07/2024

Yeah machine learning is more or less just very complex application of control theory techniques and notably it is usually done by people without formal control theory backgrounds.

Super useful for control applications but obviously you really want to know control theory so that you aren't just using ML to throw darts at a wall.

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