DeepMind scientists have found another application of artificial intelligence (AI) software in the real world.
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The London-based artificial intelligence lab, which is owned by Alphabet, announced on Wednesday that it has trained an AI system to control and sculpt a superheated plasma inside a nuclear fusion reactor.
Nuclear fusion, a process that powers the stars of the universe, involves the crushing and fusing of hydrogen, which is a common element of seawater.
The process, which releases vast amounts of energy, has been touted as a potentially limitless source of clean energy, but a number of technical challenges still need to be overcome.
Here on Earth, scientists use tokamaks to try to recreate the nuclear fusion reactions that occur in space.
The magnets in these tokamaks are used to "contain" the volatile hydrogen plasma, which is hotter than the sun's core. Controlling the magnetic coils currently requires multiple layers of complex control systems.
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Martin Riedmiller, head of the control group at DeepMind and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, told CNBC that it is “a really complex” control problem.
Together with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL, a university in Lausanne, Switzerland, DeepMind said it has developed an artificial intelligence booster system that can control magnets and change their voltage thousands of times a second.
Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that DeepMind is particularly good at, involves programming an AI to take certain actions to maximize the likelihood of winning a reward in a given situation. In other words, the algorithm “learns” to complete a task by seeking out these pre-programmed rewards.
DeepMind's unnamed AI, developed in a virtual simulator, has been used about 100 times in a tokamak at the Swiss plasma center known as the Variable Configuration Tokamak. It controlled the magnets in the tokamak for two seconds, which is the maximum time the reactor can operate before overheating.
About 10-20 people from DeepMind worked on the AI system along with about 5-10 people from EPFL.
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Damien Ernst, a professor at the University of Liège who was not involved in the work, referred to the research as one of the most important applications of reinforcement learning so far, adding that it “could dramatically accelerate the development of fusion reactors and, ultimately, the ability to combat global change.”.
DeepMind has set out to crack artificial general intelligence, which is often referred to as the holy grail of artificial intelligence.
Information source: cnbc.com
