Google

A.1998-1

TAE Technologies est une société américaine basée en Californie, créée pour le développement de l’énergie de fusion aneutronique. Soutenue par le cofondateur de Microsoft Paul Allen, la société a levé plus de 500 millions de dollars d’investissement. Elle travaille avec Google Research pour créer un dénommé « algorithme optométriste ».

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/25/google-enters-race-for-nuclear-fusion-technology

TAE Technologies (formerly Tri Alpha Energy) is an American company based in Foothill Ranch, California, created for the development of aneutronic fusion power. The company’s design relies on a field-reversed configuration (FRC), which combines features from other fusion concepts in a unique fashion.

Tri Alpha Energy, which is backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has raised over $500m (£383m) in investment. It has worked with Google Research to create what they call the Optometrist algorithm. This enables high-powered computation to be combined with human judgement to find new and better solutions to complex problems.

Nuclear fusion, in which atoms are combined at extreme temperatures to release huge amounts of energy, is exceptionally complex. The physics of nuclear fusion involves non-linear phenomena, where small changes can produce large outcomes, making the engineering needed to suspend the plasma very challenging.

“The whole thing is beyond what we know how to do even with Google-scale computer resources,” said Ted Baltz, at the Google Accelerated Science Team. So the scientists combined computer learning approaches with human input by presenting researchers with choices. The researchers choose the option they instinctively feel is more promising, akin to choosing the clearer text during an eye test.

“We boiled the problem down to ‘let’s find plasma behaviours that an expert human plasma physicist thinks are interesting, and let’s not break the machine when we’re doing it’,” said Baltz. “This was a classic case of humans and computers doing a better job together than either could have separately.”

Working with Google enabled experiment’s on Tri Alpha Energy’s C2-U machine to progress much faster, with operations that took a month speeded up to just a few hours. The algorithm revealed unexpected ways of operating the plasma, with the research published on Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The team achieved a 50% reduction in energy losses from the system and a resulting increase in total plasma energy, which must reach a critical threshold for fusion to occur.

Damian Carrington, « Google enters race for nuclear fusion technology », The Guardian, 25 juillet 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/25/google-enters-race-for-nuclear-fusion-technology

Image: Central confinement chamber of C-2U, a plasma confinement experiment comprising 10,000 engineering control tags and 1,000 physics diagnostics channels at Tri Alpha Energy’s research facility in California, US. The algorithm will cut the time it takes to work out best possible options to form plasma from a month to just a few hours. Photograph: Courtesy of Tri Alpha Energy Inc.

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