Given the plethora of new possibilities, we decided to assume as little as possible about what we might discover. We want to let the data speak to us, rather than asking it narrowly-focused questions. Run II data collection will start in March 2001, and the CDF and DZero detectors will record almost a million proton-antiproton scattering events per day. Physicists expect to identify about one hundred classes of events, with all events in a particular event class identified by a unique number of leptons, electroweak bosons, neutrinos and jets. For each event class, the software package Sleuth assigns two to four variables, which can be calculated from the transverse momenta and missing energy associated with the particles and jets observed in each event.
Sleuth looks at one event class at a time.
It uses various other software packages to calculate the Standard Model background in a given class. Then the search for new particles begins. Sleuth contains an algorithm to help distinguish these possible signal events from the background events in a very efficient and model-independent way. Instead of several variables ranging from zero to infinity, Sleuth introduces a new set of special variables limited to values between 0 and 1. In addition, Sleuth's transformation spreads the background uniformly across the unit box, making it a flat distribution.