Electric boats - the future???

[ditchcrawler]

4 minutes ago, Steilsteven said:

Very interesting Brian, thanks.

 

Keith

We will see how it goes

[Detling]

Canal boats on still/slow water represent a small subset of boats, and with recharging points available can successfully be electric. A tidal waters boat often needs to be able to-do 10 knots into waves to be safe, not so easy with electric, and a RNLI. Lifeboats frequently do 25 knots into big waves and can be at sea for 24 hours, there is not room for the required batteries for such performance. As Greta said it is politicians blah blah a lot of hot air.  But where we go to in the next decade should be interesting, but just not where they say today. 

[Richard10002]

6 hours ago, Detling said:

  But where we go to in the next decade should be interesting, but just not where they say today. 

The iPhone wasn't launched until 2007. Its hard to imagine life without a smartphone now.

 

There us a strong chance that things will evolve that we don't even know exist right now. In fact, some stuff won't exist right now.

[magpie patrick]

13 hours ago, Richard10002 said:

The iPhone wasn't launched until 2007. Its hard to imagine life without a smartphone now.

 

There us a strong chance that things will evolve that we don't even know exist right now. In fact, some stuff won't exist right now.

 

Indeed, but would you have bet the house on iPhone development doing what it has over the last 14 years? The equivalent would be that anyting but iPhones would have been banned in 2016 - that would have taken A LOT of confidence in how things would work out when there were unknown unknowns in the equation. 

Almost all requirements for electric vehicles and electric everything else would be resolved if we could get nuclear fusion to work - that was promised to be "too cheap to meter" in 1945, but 76 years later it hasn't happened, not all prophecies come true

[Briss]

1 hour ago, magpie patrick said:

 

<snip...>

Almost all requirements for electric vehicles and electric everything else would be resolved if we could get nuclear fusion to work - that was promised to be "too cheap to meter" in 1945, but 76 years later it hasn't happened, not all prophecies come true

 

There are big advances being made in fusion technology by the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which in itself is advancing rapidly.

Nuclear Fusion and Artificial Intelligence: the Dream of Limitless Energy

 

One company working towards making nuclear fusion commercial is TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri-Alpha Energy) and its CEO Michl Binderbauer claims that "commercialisation is coming in the next five years". Google Research's Applied Science branch has helped TAE discover new fusion techniques and CEO John Platt has said that "fusion has this potential for unlimited energy". Even though Binderbauer's claim was met with scepticism from the scientific community, AI could be the game-changer when it comes to nuclear fusion on Earth.

 

 

 

EDIT: ...and this from a week ago...

 

• The fusion start-up Helion Energy announced a $500 million funding round on Friday.
• The round was lead by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, who put $375 million into Helion, his largest investment in a start-up ever.
• Helion Energy plans to use the $500 million to complete the construction of Polaris, its 7th generation fusion facility, which it broke ground on in July, and which it aims to use to demonstrate net electricity production in 2024.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Briss

[IanD]

18 minutes ago, Briss said:

 

There are big advances being made in fusion technology by the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which in itself is advancing rapidly.

Nuclear Fusion and Artificial Intelligence: the Dream of Limitless Energy

 

One company working towards making nuclear fusion commercial is TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri-Alpha Energy) and its CEO Michl Binderbauer claims that "commercialisation is coming in the next five years". Google Research's Applied Science branch has helped TAE discover new fusion techniques and CEO John Platt has said that "fusion has this potential for unlimited energy". Even though Binderbauer's claim was met with scepticism from the scientific community, AI could be the game-changer when it comes to nuclear fusion on Earth.

 

 

 

EDIT: ...and this from a week ago...

 

• The fusion start-up Helion Energy announced a $500 million funding round on Friday.
• The round was lead by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, who put $375 million into Helion, his largest investment in a start-up ever.
• Helion Energy plans to use the $500 million to complete the construction of Polaris, its 7th generation fusion facility, which it broke ground on in July, and which it aims to use to demonstrate net electricity production in 2024.

Just remember, fusion power has been 15 years away for the last 60 years...

[Briss]

46 minutes ago, IanD said:

Just remember, fusion power has been 15 years away for the last 60 years...

 

It has indeed... I lived just down from the JET project (Joint European Torus) at Culham, Oxfordshire in the 80s and followed it with interest. It was always joked that if the house lights dimmed then JET had taken all the output from Didcot Power Station again.

 

However; just remember the massive advances in AI in the past 15 years which has been a real game-changer for fusion tech. Real-time control of the plasma containment is just one example.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Briss

[IanD]

10 minutes ago, Briss said:

 

It has indeed... I lived just down from the JET project (Joint European Torus) at Culham, Oxfordshire in the 80s and followed it with interest.

 

However; just remember the massive advances in AI in the past 15 years which has been a real game-changer for fusion tech. Real-time control of the plasma containment is just one example.

Nuclear fusion is like rockets; the science is easy, it's the engineering that's hard, and no amount of AI will fix that -- at best it's a fancier control system.

 

I'm fed up of people in so many fields who keep claiming miracles for AI -- which is misnamed anyway. What it actually means is a way of solving a problem without needing to understand what underlies it, just throw a huge pile of data at it and a desired outcome and it will magically come up with a solution without anybody having to sit down and write the algorithms.

 

The problems of nuclear fusion have been well known for a long time, and are incredibly difficult to solve not because we don't understand them but because of the ridiculous conditions needed to initiate and maintain it, and the extremely difficult engineering required to confine it and extract the energy, and make this work economically. AI is not going to solve these problems, even if it helps with writing the control algorithms...

Edited November 15, 2021 by IanD

[Briss]

I have to presume you know more than me about AI as you're so fed-up with it. However; my understanding of AI is software that re-writes itself and can "teach" itself. An example would be AI "taught" itself to land a drone on an aircraft carrier in rough seas. It, of course, gets things wrong but then lessons get learnt and it gets better next time... which is how all technology progresses.

 

AI can run simulations of fusion, "learn" from what went wrong and re-run the simulation. It can do this thousands of times and feed information back to the engineers. The engineers write the algorithms in the first place and the AI refines them. Engineers tend not to believe in magic and they wouldn't waste their time on it if it wasn't useful.

 

It's an incredibly fast moving field and I would imagine the various competitors in the "race for fusion" aren't telling everything they know, but specifically stating that "AI is not going to solve these problems..." means that you're either at the forefront of AI research... or just making stuff up. History is littered with examples of that sort of statement proved wrong.

[magpie patrick]

3 minutes ago, Briss said:

AI can run simulations of fusion, "learn" from what went wrong and re-run the simulation. It can do this thousands of times and feed information back to the engineers. The engineers write the algorithms in the first place and the AI refines them. Engineers tend not to believe in magic and they wouldn't waste their time on it if it wasn't useful.

 

That runs a very big risk of falling over when the simulation is replaced by the reality

 

In any event you're missing the point - we can't afford the "bet the bank" on something that has a significant risk of not happening - solutions for a given timescale need to have known technology to implement them, and a method for installing that technology. At any one location providing a charging point for a BEV is generally a matter of regulatory approval and some cable - providing 100 in the same street needs and upgrade to the infrastructure but is a known quantity, providing for 20 million nationally may involve generating capacity that we can't easily deliver without either burning more coal of relying on technology we haven't yet got. 

If the early promises of fusion had been true, we'd have been driving electric cars in the 1970's and fossil fuels could have gone when leaded petrol was phased out - whilst the technology may have moved on it's still far from certain it will work

[Briss]

Just for fun....

 

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein, 1932

 

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin, Mathematician, Physicist and President of the Royal Society, 1883

 

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union – 1876

 

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” – New York Times, 1936

 

“The horse is here to stay, but the auto-mobile is only a novelty, a fad.” – President of the Michigan Savings Bank, 1903

 

“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl Zanuck, co-founder of 20th Century Fox, 1946

 

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

 

“I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” – Robert Metcalfe, Founder of 3 Com, 1995

 

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007

 

And this is obviously my favourite...

 

“The Beatles have no future in show business. We don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” – executives at Decca Records in 1962

 

 

[Briss]

10 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

 

That runs a very big risk of falling over when the simulation is replaced by the reality

 

In any event you're missing the point - we can't afford the "bet the bank" on something that has a significant risk of not happening - solutions for a given timescale need to have known technology to implement them, and a method for installing that technology. At any one location providing a charging point for a BEV is generally a matter of regulatory approval and some cable - providing 100 in the same street needs and upgrade to the infrastructure but is a known quantity, providing for 20 million nationally may involve generating capacity that we can't easily deliver without either burning more coal of relying on technology we haven't yet got. 

If the early promises of fusion had been true, we'd have been driving electric cars in the 1970's and fossil fuels could have gone when leaded petrol was phased out - whilst the technology may have moved on it's still far from certain it will work

 

New tech is always risky, but that's what "advancement" is all about. It could fail, but is that no reason not to try. I think there's enough people out there who think it could work to be spending huge amounts of money and time on it.

 

I'm not missing the point as such... I'm making a different point that some people may find interesting about the future and the availability (or not) of fusion providing unlimited power, which was a point made by somebody else.

 

See my above "quotes" post... I think that answers your final paragraph. And the people who made those quotes should've known what they were talking about. This is an internet forum for narrowboats... perhaps our predictive power about future technology isn't up there with the best!🙂

Edited November 15, 2021 by Briss

[IanD]

1 hour ago, Briss said:

I have to presume you know more than me about AI as you're so fed-up with it. However; my understanding of AI is software that re-writes itself and can "teach" itself. An example would be AI "taught" itself to land a drone on an aircraft carrier in rough seas. It, of course, gets things wrong but then lessons get learnt and it gets better next time... which is how all technology progresses.

 

AI can run simulations of fusion, "learn" from what went wrong and re-run the simulation. It can do this thousands of times and feed information back to the engineers. The engineers write the algorithms in the first place and the AI refines them. Engineers tend not to believe in magic and they wouldn't waste their time on it if it wasn't useful.

 

It's an incredibly fast moving field and I would imagine the various competitors in the "race for fusion" aren't telling everything they know, but specifically stating that "AI is not going to solve these problems..." means that you're either at the forefront of AI research... or just making stuff up. History is littered with examples of that sort of statement proved wrong.

 

I have indeed been involved in AI research -- and it does indeed have its uses, but is vastly over-promoted as to its capabilities.

 

What is normally called "AI" is absolutely *not* software that can re-write itself, it's usually a multi-layer neural network that is trained with either a big heap of data or let loose on a real system, given a desirable outcome, and told to maximise the desired result -- in the case you mention, landing without crashing. Boston Dynamics used the same approach to teach one of their recent robots how to walk.

 

The good news is that in many cases it can do this without being told *how* to do it, but there's no "re-writing of software", all that happens is that the weights in the neural network converge to values which give the "best" result.

 

The bad news is that we don't know how or why it works, just that it does, so it can be very difficult to then use the same solution (neuron coefficients) for a different (but related/similar) problem because we don't know what the algorithm is, you just have to re-train it all over again -- otherwise it might converge to a very bad result given a different data set.

 

More bad news is that because the calculation is hidden we don't know what was actually used to get to the final result. A classic case was when (IIRC) Google tried to use AI to pre-screen candidates for interview having trained it on the successful candidates in the past and existing employees, and it was then found to filter out 90% of female and black applicants.

 

I'm really not sure that you want something whose internal working you don't understand controlling a fusion reactor... 😉

 

Against this argument, there have been cases which really show what AI is capable of, one being the latest IBM game-playing software. Earlies ones (e.g. Big Blue) had to be coded to play a particular game (e.g. chess), but the newest one can be given any game together with the rules and what counts as winning and "teach" itself how to play it -- of course it doesn't really do this, it just tries a vast number of games and inherently converges towards the "best" result. IIRC this was the system that beat the world Go champion, a game which was said to be so strategically complex that no computer could ever do this -- and in the process it came up with some previously unknown moves and strategies that no human had ever spotted. But we still don't know *how* it does it, only that it wins...

 

So AI can do what it's good at extremely well, but in reality it's over-hyped and stuck as a label on to lots of things just because it's a modern buzzword that helps raise money, like crypto...

Edited November 15, 2021 by IanD

[IanD]

1 hour ago, Briss said:

Just for fun....

 

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein, 1932

 

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin, Mathematician, Physicist and President of the Royal Society, 1883

 

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union – 1876

 

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” – New York Times, 1936

 

“The horse is here to stay, but the auto-mobile is only a novelty, a fad.” – President of the Michigan Savings Bank, 1903

 

“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl Zanuck, co-founder of 20th Century Fox, 1946

 

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

 

“I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” – Robert Metcalfe, Founder of 3 Com, 1995

 

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007

 

And this is obviously my favourite...

 

“The Beatles have no future in show business. We don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” – executives at Decca Records in 1962

 

 

And of course you could also come up with the same number (or even more) predictions of things that were definitely going to happen but didn't. That particular knife cuts both ways... 😉

[nicknorman]

19 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

I'm really not sure that you want something whose internal working you don't understand controlling a fusion reactor... 😉

 

so that’s humans ruled out then!

[nicknorman]

On the AI thing, there was a project involving helicopter gearboxes, from which vibration data of the various elements (spur gears, roller and ball bearings, epicyclic gears, bevel gears) was routinely collected. Quite a complex data set following signal processing of the different channels into different types of info.

 

Trained the AI with some known healthy gearboxes and a few which failed shortly afterwards. It was pretty good at detecting incipient faults after the training. Obviously a very specific environment and criteria.

 

I would imagine fusion plasma containment is a similar thing, a very specific set of circumstances and a very specific goal, the only difference perhaps being the inherently chaotic system which is the plasma’s behaviour.

Edited November 15, 2021 by nicknorman

[Briss]

22 minutes ago, IanD said:

And of course you could also come up with the same number (or even more) predictions of things that were definitely going to happen but didn't. That particular knife cuts both ways... 😉

Exactly... if you make enough guesses then occasionally, by chance, one turns out to be right. You then call it a prediction and go round telling everybody about it. People are very fond of telling others how their favourite science fiction writer predicted the future... forgetting the fact that the books are full of "made up stuff" with a couple of things that occasionally get close to the mark. All the other "stuff" is conveniently forgotten about and their favourite author is a visionary.

 

“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.” – Francis Bacon

 

 

[IanD]

1 minute ago, Briss said:

Exactly... if you make enough guesses then occasionally, by chance, one turns out to be right. You then call it a prediction and go round telling everybody about it. People are very fond of telling others how their favourite science fiction writer predicted the future... forgetting the fact that the books are full of "made up stuff" with a couple of things that occasionally get close to the mark. All the other "stuff" is conveniently forgotten about and their favourite author is a visionary.

 

“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.” – Francis Bacon

 

 

Fusion power, flying cars, space elevators, colonies on the Moon/Mars, hypersonic planes, exoskeletons, deep-sea colonies, living on algae and recycled proles...

[Briss]

I'm not going to predict the future... I'll wait and see how AI develops. Or we can all make guesses (based on varying degrees of knowledge), and the one who gets closest can earn the kudos of calling it a prediction.

 

“I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.” – Wilbur Wright, inventor of the airplane

[Briss]

3 minutes ago, IanD said:

Fusion power, flying cars, space elevators, colonies on the Moon/Mars, hypersonic planes, exoskeletons, deep-sea colonies, living on algae and recycled proles...

Au contraire... 😀

 

 

 

[IanD]

3 minutes ago, Briss said:

Au contraire... 😀

 

 

 

Which he's been been promoting for many years, with zero success...

 

I meant widely available and in use by the general public, not a one-off publicity puff. You can get a powered exoskeleton if you've got half a million quid to spare, but I wouldn't say that makes them "available"... 😉

Edited November 15, 2021 by IanD

[Athy]

2 hours ago, Briss said:

 

 

“The Beatles have no future in show business. We don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” – executives at Decca Records in 1962

 

 

Dick Rowe, who miraculously kept his job at Decca until the 1970s - though by that time he had signed The Rolling Stones, The Moody Blues, Tom Jones etc. etc., which must have helped.

[ditchcrawler]

But you have to remember there is no real reason why there should be any new narrowbaots after 2030, they aren't a legal requirement to have on the canals. If  they can ban central heating and fires in houses getting shot of or not allowing any more expensive toys is no big deal. Think of all the CO saved in not making that steel as well.

[TheBiscuits]

36 minutes ago, IanD said:

You can get a powered exoskeleton if you've got half a million quid to spare, but I wouldn't say that makes them "available"... 😉

 

Or an all electric boat for half that ...

 

(I don't disagree, it was just far too good a feeder line to ignore!)

[IanD]

4 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Or an all electric a series hybrid boat for half that ...

 

(I don't disagree, it was just far too good a feeder line to ignore!)

FTFY 😉