Fake Banner
Holiday Chess Riddle

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several...

Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very)...

The Buried Lottery

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a...

Twenty Years Blogging

Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Bente Lilja Byepicture for Sascha Vongehrpicture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Johannes Koelman
Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

 Blogroll
Lubos Motl, Prospective Winner Of Higgs Challenge ?

Lubos Motl, Prospective Winner Of Higgs Challenge ?

Jun 08 2014 | comment(s)

Today among the three top players -those in the money- at the Higgs challenge we see the appearance of Lubos Motl, whom I had signalled as a participant in an earlier posting. We all know that Lubos is a smart guy, but I doubted whether he would take this very seriously. However, it seems he is. As we speak he has submitted almost 100 solutions (you can submit up to 5 solutions per day, so that means having worked at this at least 20 days in a row).

In the clip below you see the top standers from the challenge site's leaderboard:

Nearest Neighbors: An Algorithm You Know

Nearest Neighbors: An Algorithm You Know

Jun 04 2014 | comment(s)

You are the first to arrive to a dinner party and must choose the table where to sit, relying on your past experience of how handsome members of the opposite sex (you're straight) usually choose their seat. You need to buy stocks based on past performances and trends. You travel to some distant location and would like to know what's the weather like there, but there is no forecast for that particular place. What do you do ?
Really Geek Humor: Computer Code Comments

Really Geek Humor: Computer Code Comments

Jun 02 2014 | comment(s)

Programmers may not be the guys with the best sense of humor around, but I found it quite entertaining to read a web page with a collection of source code comments arising a smile.

The one I liked the most is the following - not even a comment, but the way the guy called the object he instantiates:

The Quote Of The Week - How Quarks Came To Be Accepted

The Quote Of The Week - How Quarks Came To Be Accepted

May 30 2014 | comment(s)

"After the 1974 London Conference, with its strong confirmation of the quark model, a general change of view developed with regard to the structure of hadrons. [...] the quark structure of hadrons became the dominant view for developing theory and planning experiments. A crucial element of this change was the general acceptance of QCD, which eliminated the last paradox, namely, why are there no free quarks ? The conjectured infrared slavery mechanism of QCD provided a reason to accept quarks as physical constituents without demanding the existence of free quarks. The asymptotic freedom property of QCD also provided a ready explanation of scaling [...].
The Plot Of The Week - The Source Of Higgs Bosons

The Plot Of The Week - The Source Of Higgs Bosons

May 29 2014 | comment(s)

One of the nice details lost in the big picture of the Higgs boson discovery of 2012 is that a significant part of the signal put in evidence by ATLAS and CMS is produced by a very special kind of interactions between the protons accelerated by the LHC. These are "vector boson fusion" processes, whereby it is not the protons or its constituents that come in direct contact, but rather, each proton emits a W boson, and it is the latter pair which fuse together, give rise to a Higgs particle.
Higgs Classification Challenge Status

Higgs Classification Challenge Status

May 27 2014 | comment(s)

I reported here a few days ago about a very nice challenge issued by the ATLAS experiment: find Higgs boson decays to tau lepton pairs in a sample containing signal as well as background events, using a training sample with correct signal and background labels per each event.

The challenge consists of solving a typical classification problem in a highly multidimensional space (30 dimensions) better than all other participants - the metric to judge being an "approximate median significance" of the subset of events that the user classifies as "signal". This is given by the formula

AMS = sqrt {2 * [(s+b+10) * log(1 + s/(b+10)) - s] }