A Permanent State of Kobayashi Maru

The director’s cut of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was shown in cinemas last weekend as part of national cinema day. It is the best of the Star Trek films, and among other things features a superb villain played by Ricardo Montalban. It reminded me that even in the rarified atmosphere of the […]

Optimism, morality & risk

A few people now have expressed surprise verging on dismay about my questioning of the wisdom of trying to suppress Covid-19 as aggressively as we are attempting. I already wrote a post about modelling back in March, and you could probably tell from my last paragraph that I felt the danger of an over-reaction was […]

Modelling the invisible part of the cross-section

I am on day 3 – or is it 4, I lose count – of a quarantine since coming down with mild flu-like symptoms on Tuesday. For about half of that time I have been asleep, but the other half has seen a parade of infuriating posts on social media, many of which come from […]

Using Wavelets to Remove Pile-Up at the LHC

If you read my previous post on using deep learning as a parton shower, you may have seen in the introduction that my original inspiration for creating that model was wavelet analysis of LHC collisions. Just before Christmas, Craig Wiglesworth and I put out another paper describing how to use wavelets to remove pile-up from […]

A Deep Learning Parton Shower in Fewer than 100 Lines of Python

In a recent paper, I have described how a deep learning network can be structured to behave in the same way as (a component of) the models of particle production that are used for proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. The basic idea of a parton shower is that a single parton – that’s […]