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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I'm just an old man, pointing out that it's all been done before, and it will all be done again. The big difference is it looks like they're in the realtime controller for the plasma, rather than determining static settings for a subsequent run.

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This is super cool, thanks for sharing. Also, you’re right, that name is dope.

Silicon valley would name it, ahem... Atomicly. Uber for atoms.

Since the .com domain would be gone, it would most likely be Atomcly

Yours was a tools and infrastructure project, and this is about learned, autonomous control. They are completely different goals.

> determining static settings for a subsequent run.

AFAICT, your software didn't do that. Rather it provided infrastructure for the researchers to do that themselves more efficiently.

From your paper:

> The ultimate goal of FusionGrid is to allow scientists at geographically distributed sites to participate fully in experimental and computational activities...

Exactly what are you saying has been done before?

The guy was saying nothing, people have done computer work in fusion and they will use computers again!

Profound.

He was merely giving a shameless plug of whatever infra project he was involved in.

Congrats - it involves computers and fusion.

I have no problem with a shameless plug -- it's an interesting show of how things used to be -- but he claimed more than that

> a previous project that was sort of an ancestor to this

> it's all been done before

implying that the current work build on his work in some way, which I don't see.

Could you be a bit clearer why you're being critical? Much of what DeepMind does is rooted in prior projects, they just sprinkle a little more RL and have a great press team. Nobody would use their system for real in production, just like when they published how they could run Google datacenters 5% cheaper in real time- turns out, nobody actually deployed that because the settings it came up with don't make sense to humans.

I'm not trying to be critical of your project, sorry if it came off that way. I'm just trying to clarify when you say "it's all been done before", exactly what in the current work had been done in your project. Although they are both in the fusion domain, I don't see how the current work builds on anything done in your work, even in a very distant way.

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