This episode is the last of four very special episodes produced by the students of Stanford’s Autumn 2018-2019 freshman seminar EE 25N! In Episode 5 of The Informaticists, Team Go HAAM! brings together fascinating topics from two ends of the physics spectrum: the very tiny (as explained by Peter McMahon, postdoctoral scholar in the Mabuchi lab) and the mind-bogglingly large (as explained by Dr. Andrew Rasmussen).

Team Go HAAM! consists of Hamza el Boudali, Ashley Kwon, Alexa Ramachandran and Mia Bahr.

To find out more about the topics discussed in this episode, check out:

• Peter McMahon’s article about his work on an Ising machine
• A technical paper describing the Ising model formulations for problems that are very difficult to solve computationally
• Some mathematical progress from a few years back on the Traveling Salesman Problem
• The official webpage of the Large Synoptic Space Telescope (LSST)
• SLAC’s webpage for the digital camera of the LSST

Images of Andrew Rasmussen, Peter McMahon and Seth Digel from personal collections