Benjamin Nachman

In the Large Hadron Collider's detector, each proton collision leaves thousands of points — tracks of flying particles. A neural network learned to spot patterns in this scatter and predict what happened at the moment of impact.

In a collider detector, each proton collision leaves a trail of dozens of particles, like the splash from a stone thrown into water. Making sense of that splash and understanding what exactly happened at the moment of impact is a task that humans can no longer handle alone.

A neural network trained on collisions of protons and electrons transferred its skills to a completely different experiment — catching neutrinos. Like a chef who learned French cuisine and then, without preparation, baked an excellent Uzbek plov.