AI is changing how we do science. Get a glimpse

Particle physicists began fiddling with artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1980s, just as the term "neural network" captured the public's imagination. Their field lends itself to AI and machine-learning algorithms because nearly every experiment centers on finding subtle spatial patterns in the countless, similar readouts of complex particle detectors--just the sort of thing at which AI excels. "It took us several years to convince people that this is not just some magic, hocus-pocus, black box stuff," says Boaz Klima, of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, one of the first physicists to embrace the techniques. Neural networks search for fingerprints of new particles in the debris of collisions at the LHC. Particle physicists strive to understand the inner workings of the universe by smashing subatomic particles together with enormous energies to blast out exotic new bits of matter.