3 ms·

A completely clueless question: do they dramatically reconfigure the LHC and other colliders for each type of experiment? Or can you do something like Google d

by zellyn 8y ago

A completely clueless question: do they dramatically reconfigure the LHC and other colliders for each type of experiment? Or can you do something like Google did with Tri Alpha Energy [1] to explore interesting parts of the state space, and just generate tons of data for people to chew on? Or does reconfiguring it for human-directed experiments effectively explore the state space enough that there's data to chew on just fine? Asking out of curiosity. I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff; not trying to “hey what if they just tried X…” on this :-) [1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/so-there-i-was-firing-megawatt-plasma.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/so-there-i-was-firing-mega...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ganzuul 8y ago
The latter. They generate much more data than what they can even retain, so they filter it in multiple stages.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I think your answer (with which I agree) is a confirmation of the former. The questions-to-be-answered must be posed first, so that the low level filtering can filter out what we aren't interested in, because we can't record all the hits for each event and store them. (although I think one should consider it, perhaps if a huge part of the budget had always gone to storage, we might have petabyte databases for lower energies, which could now be stored on consumer HDD's and new patterns in old experiments could be found, while at the time of this old experiment this may have seemed senseless as no individual physicists could back then hope to have a local copy. Similarily today it would generate preposterous amounts of data, but if we record them now (even if expensive) then physicists 20 years from now might be able to store them on their future personal media...
marcosdumay 8y ago
IANAP, but as far as I know, it's both. There are filters that throw away most (nearly all) of the data generated by the LHC as soon as it's acquired. Some experiments require adapting those filters to gather different data. But most of the time the filters in place do collect the relevant data, and experimental analysis consists on walking through tons of already collected data.

by zellyn 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ganzuul 8y ago

The latter. They generate much more data than what they can even retain, so they filter it in multiple stages.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
I think your answer (with which I agree) is a confirmation of the former. The questions-to-be-answered must be posed first, so that the low level filtering can filter out what we aren't interested in, because we can't record all the hits for each event and store them. (although I think one should consider it, perhaps if a huge part of the budget had always gone to storage, we might have petabyte databases for lower energies, which could now be stored on consumer HDD's and new patterns in old experiments could be found, while at the time of this old experiment this may have seemed senseless as no individual physicists could back then hope to have a local copy. Similarily today it would generate preposterous amounts of data, but if we record them now (even if expensive) then physicists 20 years from now might be able to store them on their future personal media...

marcosdumay 8y ago

IANAP, but as far as I know, it's both. There are filters that throw away most (nearly all) of the data generated by the LHC as soon as it's acquired. Some experiments require adapting those filters to gather different data. But most of the time the filters in place do collect the relevant data, and experimental analysis consists on walking through tons of already collected data.