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algon33

67 karma · joined February 17, 2017

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algon33··on Einstein: 'Principles of Research' – for Max Planck's 60th birthday (1918)
Nearly everything in there does not require a knowledge of physics to understand, though a bit of familiarity with philosophy would make reading it a touch easier.
algon33··on A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life
How come the GoL runtimes are only ~300 times longer than the VarLife runtimes? Is it because the metapixels can be more efficiently simulated than running the game of life rules? Or because of sparsity of cells or some-such thing?

This is seriously cool BTW.

algon33··on Numerics applied to Casimir geometry generates intersection with Alcubierre warp
General reminder: the Alcubierre warp drive does not allow you to accelerate to from sub-c speeds to above-c speeds. This back-reaction post discusses the topic, linking to a paper on a better design for an Alcubierre warp drive: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/11/warp-drive-news-ser...
algon33··on A Bayesian Perspective on Q-Learning
Super cool. How long did this take to make?

I kind of wonder if there is some nice analogy to be made here wrt. Kelly Betting vs Bayesian RL. As in, some version of maximising log reward will have higher median performance than Bayesian RL even though on average Bayesian RL is better. By analogy, the discprepancy should come from Bayesian RL doing vastly better in some unlikely string of world trajectories.

algon33··on Book Review: Raise a Genius (2017)
Scott doesn't program things. There's a guy he knows who set it up, so it depends on his schedule I guess.
algon33··on Ask HN: I implemented the life I designed: perfect but I feel lost. What now?
+1 We're social animals after all. If nothing else, just spend a month learning about human psychology and motivation.
algon33··on Bangkok Smoking Kid
"Drink yourself to sleep" is weirdly phrased. Could you clarify?

Also, thanks for the positive re-inforcement idea.

algon33··on Brain's Expectations Affect Learning
Anyone have a link to the original paper?
algon33··on The formula for pi buried in a hydrogen atom
Thanks for the link. You guessed well, it is a fun read.

Its quite satisfying you get the property from the rotational aspect of the QM.

algon33··on Three kinds of early humans unearthed living together in South Africa
Anyone have a link to the actual paper? Couldn't find it on the author's page and the article doesn't appear to name it.
algon33··on The World’s Great Photographers, Many Stuck Inside, Have Snapped
It is probably a pun the author could not resist. Dramatic? Perhaps. Amusing? Definitely.
algon33··on The U.S. National Academies Reports on the Prospects for Quantum Computing
What's the deal with measurement based quantum computing? It seems strikingly different to adiabatic and gate based computation.
algon33··on After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning
What? You can get GTX 1070's for $200-$250 right now off ebay. Admittedly used, but crypto mining doesn't harm a card that much. If you want new, GTX 1060s are going for under $200$.

Then again, AMD's making pretty bold claims about their pricing for next year, so you could hang on.

algon33··on The Devil's Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016)
Is anyone else reminded of that SpongeBob episode where Squidward leaves to be free of leaf blowers?
algon33··on I'm Scott Aaronson, quantum computing/computational complexity researcher. AMA
Hi Scott,

Do you think that chaotic systems would be better analysed by quantum computing over classical computing? More generally, is BQP powerful enough to deal with chaotic systems in the same way P is for linear systems?

Oh, and I think your review of "Enlightenment Now" was a bit too rosy. When he analysed the data he's superb, but he seems to lambast people he heavily disagrees with. Its a tad disheartening.

algon33··on Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube
Yes, they take the state of the video every 16 frames and look at its embedding. These were made into checkpoints.

The AI is rewarded if at each checkpoint the state vector its produced is sufficiently aligned with the videos.

I guess that's the initial training to deal with sparse rewards.

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