Rise of the machines

Machine learning will become an even more important tool when scientists upgrade to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. When do a few scattered dots become a line? And when does that line become a particle track? For decades, physicists have been asking these kinds of questions. Today, so are their machines. Machine learning is the process by which the task of pattern recognition is outsourced to a computer algorithm. Humans are naturally very good at finding and processing patterns. That...