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Particles and interactions

Particles and interactions

Web life: Particle Clicker

30 Oct 2014
Taken from the October 2014 issue of Physics World
Particle Clicker

So what is the site about?

Particle Clicker is a game that lets players run their own simulated particle-physics experiment. It was created at CERN earlier this year during a 48-hour “hackathon” in which teams of students competed to develop the best computing projects, and it is both simple and addictive. Visitors to the website are greeted with a stylized image of a particle detector. When you click on the detector, it lights up as simulated collisions send showers of particles across the screen. Creating such collisions increases your stockpile of data – something you’ll need in copious amounts if you want to turn your modest collider experiment into a world-leading collaboration.

Is that all you need to do?

Not at all. Clicking over and over again like a demented lab rat will send your data count spiralling upwards, and in the game’s early stages this is the only way you can make progress. But just as in real life, the big bosses in this game (that’s you) don’t have to do their own grunt work for long. Once you’ve made your first scientific discovery (a couple of dozen clicks should get you there), your reputation grows and the grant money starts trickling in. Before long, you’re rich enough to hire your very own PhD students to do the clicking for you. From there, it’s onwards and upwards as you and your growing army of minions work to amass the data, reputation and funding you need to advance the cause of particle physics to unheralded levels of procrasti–er, glory.

Anything else I should know about?

Having an army of PhD students, postdocs and even – gasp! – summer students beavering away on your behalf is fine as far as it goes, but they will work a lot more efficiently if you spend some of your hard-won funding on technical upgrades. Improvements to efficiency and accelerator luminosity will give you more data per click, and bestowing some tongue-in-cheek perks on your workforce (free beer for the PhD students, extra coffee for the postdocs) will make them more productive, too. You can also choose to spend money on public relations, which boosts your reputation and how fast you win funding.

Why you should visit…

Particle Clicker’s developers have made a decent effort to build some science into the game. As well as the information boxes that pop up when you make a new discovery, the gameplay itself parallels the real scientific process in a number of ways. For example, the quantity of data required to make new discoveries increases over time – a fair reflection of the extremely data-intensive nature of modern particle physics. Also, once you have made a discovery, you can choose to investigate it further and thereby boost your reputation. However, each time you do this, the amount of data you need to amass in order to achieve the same reputation boost goes up. This, again, seems realistic: discovering charge–parity (CP) violation led to James Cronin and Val Fitch winning a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1980, but making an equally groundbreaking discovery today about this (now relatively well understood) phenomenon would require a prodigious amount of research.

…and why maybe you shouldn’t

In its early stages, the game is seriously addictive, with scientific discoveries and upgrades appearing thick and fast. After an hour or two, though, it slows to a crawl as hiring new people and performing new experiments becomes prohibitively expensive. After this point, there’s not a great deal you can do except wait around for the Higgs boson to show up, which seems a trifle anticlimactic. But given how much time Particle Clicker can eat up, perhaps a built-in taper is not such a bad thing.

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