Evaluation of Genetic Programming and Neural Networks Techniques for Nuclear Material Identification

Nuclear materials safeguard efforts necessitate the use of non-destructive methods to determine the attributes of fissile samples enclosed in special, non-accessible containers. To this end, a large variety of methods has been developed. Usually, a given set of statistics of the stochastic neutron-photon coupled field, such as source-detector, detector-detector cross correlation functions, and multiplicities are measured over a range of known samples to develop calibration algorithms. In this manner, the attributes of unknown samples can be inferred by the use of the calibration results.