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Comment by drwu | Hacker News Reader

This looks like just a little bit advanced trivial optimizations for reducing size of high gain antennae. Usually I expect to find such articles in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

What is the reason that it appears on Nature? Just because the genetic methods become the hype (again)?

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Note that this is not in the journal Nature, but the considerably lower impact Nature Communications Engineering.

It's so new that it does not yet have an impact factor, but Nature themselves say it's less prestigious than their second-tier journal Nature Communications.

The name is also super weird, because you could well be led to believe the journal is about Communications Engineering, but it is actually Communications on Engineering.

Perhaps they are having their Eureqa moment

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1165893

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureqa

For those who're only distantly aware of the kind of problem this solves (like me), the wikipedia link further elaborates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_regression

and turns out there's a Python package

https://github.com/MilesCranmer/PySR

I've needed something like this at least once (but IIRC no more than twice ;) ), so I'm glad to know what to look for next time, thanks for the rabbit hole!

The Science paper launched my PhD topic. I asked a professor what they did for research, they listed a bunch of boring things... saw that and then asked "Did you see that talk about evolving equations? Do you want to work on that?" I was like hell yes!

(Hod gave a talk at our uni about all his research topics)

I wrote a deterministic algorithm for SymReg that outperforms genetic programming.

https://github.com/verdverm/pypge

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