Bdbusinessdaily.com – The plasma inside a tokamak is a churning, billion-degree soup of ionized gas that can tear itself apart in a fraction of a second. Human operators, no matter how skilled, simply cannot react fast enough to keep that plasma contained. Now a team of scientists at Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), part of the US Department of Energy’s national laboratory system, has built a software architecture that closes that reaction-time gap. The system, known as PACMAN — an acronym standing for “prediction and control using machine learning” — makes split-second decisions about how to steer fusion plasma, and it has already passed its first live-fire trials.

The researchers validated PACMAN across five separate experimental runs on the DIII-D tokamak at the National Fusion Facility in San Diego, California. Results from those runs appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Fusion.…