The goal of the LHC Olympics data challenge is for participants to try to figure out what is in each black box — what underlying model has generated this data?

The data for the current round of Olympics can be found at the Official LHC Olympics Webpage. The procedure and details of their generation is described in some depth on this Wiki.

If you wish to use your own analysis tools, the format of the data is described in detail below. However, you can get a quick start by using the very user-friendly Chameleon package.

Why participate? There is no prize for winning — this is not a competitive exercise! [well, not particularly competitive anyway.] Instead, this is supposed to be fun and instructive at the same time! The black box analyses are only a means to an end.... The real goals here include individual and community preparation for the LHC era, and the invention of new tools and techniques which will be valuable for experimentalists and theorists when the real data starts to arrive. Indeed, we hope there will be many “winners”, with different approaches to the data.

So that the LHC Olympics can be a useful and enjoyable exercise for people with a wide variety of backgrounds, we suggest that no public announcements of “solutions” to the data challenge be made available in advance of our August conference — it would spoil the fun! However, other forms of communication, such as private consultation between participant groups, involving the sharing of software, discussion of strategies for approaching the data, etc., unpublished presentations after the conference, such as websites, or publicly available powerpoint files or written reports, publishable papers on new tools and new approaches that have been motivated by a black box analysis, are fine and indeed encouraged, as they will contribute to the success of the LHC Olympics effort.

The third LHC Olympics conference will be held August 24th and 25th at KITP in Santa Barbara.