alt Hacker NewsThere is a lot of AI research in the nuclear fusion space. For inertial confinement fusion (a competing technology to magnetic confinement fusion, e.g., tokamaks) the National Ignition Facility (NIF) used it for their experiment that resulted in "ignition."
My lab is collaborating with researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics to use AI to improve inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We recently put out this paper [1] using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to predict the outcome of ICF experiments. Currently, existing physics simulators are based on old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions and actual laser shots, so among other goals, we are trying to build better predictors using neural networks. This is needed since it is hard to rapidly iterate on real data, since they only have a dataset of around 300 ICF shots.
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Isn't there a lot of daylight between old Fortran code and AI?
What if we rewrote the old algorithms in C with modern techniques? Multitthreading? Or GPU compute? If there's value there, I could do these things. Probably wouldn't take that long
I got curious when you said " old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions " Do you have any online reference/docs that explain apis/software/source code related to projects in this area?
Here we go with the CS people saying "the old fortran codes are terrible." Yeah, the "high error" between code predictions and laser shots is because LPI is inherently noisy and it's essentially impossible to fully control conditions. I would work on expensive sims for days to weeks and the experiments would see differences that would be off from that from an order or mag because their focal point is off by a micron. There's nothing wrong with the "old Fortran codes," they have the right physics, the problem is the initial conditions are just uncontrollable so that's why simulating these systems is hard.
Codes are not magic, they are physical codes, as in, they generally encode the physics as we understand it relevant to the experiment, so you might as well say our physical models are wrong, which is a much harder bar to clear, you'd have to invalid probably near 100 years of plasma physics. The problem likely is as I said, the experiments are just hard to control and we don't know the correct inputs. It's not like weather forecasting where we can have a weather balloons across the world, we're not able to probe every micron of the target at all times for a plasma temperature and density.