like I said above, we certainly hope so! It has been slow progress so far but applying modern ML / control techniques to tokamaks is one of the truly exciting applications of the current generation of AI in my opinion. Biased because this is literally what I do all day
Do you have a github repo for the controller software? It will be fiberop to the sensors? And currentcontrolling by the ai?
Have you considered antagonistic training? One AI tries to destabilize the proces, the other trains not against a simulation, but against the destabilizing input and a succes-metric?
I'm a PhD student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon working on exactly this. It's extremely challenging for a few reasons:
- the dataset is a mess. The experiments that have been conducted on the tokamak that we have access to were done for very many different reasons and under many different configurations of the machine so there is not a clear method for disambiguating what dynamical changes are due to differences in the system vs underlying dynamical truths
- the simulators available are very slow and not that accurate
- the physics is hard enough that it's not possible to develop a controller in closed form (obviously)
This implies that we need a version of reinforcement learning or model-predictive control that is substantially more robust and sample-efficient than currently exists. We're working on that but obviously it's an open research problem.
I'm assuming disruption mitigation is a big part of what you're looking at? Controlling a normal state plasma would be nice, but recognizing incipient disruptions is absolutely critical if ITER (or ARC) is to function at all. One unmitigated disruption could break ITER.
If you have any interest in tennis (or not, honestly), I'd say start here before buying another book. Read it as a kid and then had a magical revelation years later when I connected this piece to the man itself.
If you like it, then hop onto the rest of his work from nonfiction to short-stories to IJ if you have a spare couple months.
As far as I recall, you can download code to your desktop but not your laptop, unless you’re doing something like iOS development that would be difficult to do over say ssh -Y.
