Hot on the heels of last month's nuclear fusion breakthrough comes the first results from a multi-year partnership between Google and Tri Alpha Energy, the world's largest private fusion company. The two organizations joined forces in 2014 in the hopes that Google's machine learning algorithms could advance plasma research and bring us closer to the dream of fusion power. The challenge Tri Alpha Energy faced was that the enormous experimental complexity of its plasma research involved so many variables that it was desperately in need of some advanced computing networks to help wade through the data. But it turned out that even Google didn't have the computational resources to easily address this problem. More than 1,500 New Atlas Plus subscribers directly support our journalism, and get access to our premium ad-free site and email newsletter.

Nuclear fusion, the holy grail of limitless energy production, may have moved a step closer thanks to a new computer algorithm. Since the 1950s, scientists have been trying to recreate the process which powers the sun and attempts have been getting tantalisingly close in recent years. A new breakthrough by Google relies on using an algorithm to speed up experiments on plasma, the super heated balls of gas that the technology relies on. The Optometrist algorithm sorts through simulated settings that would keep the plasma under check. This allows human operators to select the best candidates, rather than having to run each experiment manually.

Google and a leading nuclear fusion company have developed a new computer algorithm which has significantly speeded up experiments on plasmas, the ultra-hot balls of gas at the heart of the energy technology. 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.