Large Hadron Rap

2 comments

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  Anonymous says:

  September 8, 2008 at 12:13 pm

  Coolio!

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  KWRegan says:

  September 8, 2008 at 4:25 pm

  Excellent, and the physics material is explained correctly.

  The LHC is also the first collider all of whose information is “digital”, i.e. encoded in computer memory rather than by analog/physical gauges. In full operation it will write over 35 million data tracks per second! I’m told that about 99% of the data’s encoding is redundant or “nonce”—like the commas and format codes in an exported Excel spreadsheet. I am curious about the information content of the remaining 1%: will it be “truly random”, pseudo-random, or overtly structured—and how much of each? Crazily enough, this may actually have some connection to the incidence and severity of faults in the kind of hash tables used by chess programs…