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mathgenius

11,330 karma · joined May 1, 2009

Email me simon at arrowtheory.com Cheers.
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mathgenius··on Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond [pdf]
I really like this description of entanglement:

"To understand the concept of entanglement, imagine a system with many parts, for example a book which is 100 pages long. For an ordinary classical 100-page book, every time you read another page you learn another 1% of the content of the book, and after you have read all of the pages one by one you know everything that’s in the book. But now suppose instead that it’s a quantum book, where the pages are very highly entangled with one another. Then when you look at the pages one at a time you see only random gibberish, and after you have read all the pages one by one you know very little about the content of the book. That’s because the information in the quantum book is not imprinted on the individual pages; it is encoded almost entirely in how the pages are correlated with one another. If you want to read the book you have to make a collective observation on many pages at once. That’s quantum entanglement, the essential feature making information carried by quantum systems very different from information processed by ordinary digital computers."

mathgenius··on Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused
Do any of these have python interfaces?
mathgenius··on Amazon Dark Patterns
I wonder if this is a job for activist investors: buy a bunch of shady stuff on amazon with 5-star reviews, write a lengthy report about how bad all the product is, short AMZN... ?
mathgenius··on Three Major Physics Discoveries and Counting
It was nice to see this comment, because to me it means that she is always looking to the future & optimistic.

One of the near-term applications of quantum computing is for machine learning. For example, the D-wave chip is for optimising a binary fitness function. We will soon see if it works out.

mathgenius··on “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
Using select: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_(Unix)
mathgenius··on A brief introduction to quantum computing
Quantum computing is all about the tensor product. This is, roughly, how "and" works in the quantum world. Learning about tensor products by calculating with matrices is dizzyingly complicated [1]. But there's another way, using string diagrams [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronecker_product [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1787

mathgenius··on I Write Letters to CEOs
> at some level that they're in a closed chamber

I actually think it's the opposite: really successful people get there because they are more vulnerable. At least in my experience, whenever I met someone like this, they always seem way more responsive and open than the usual joe.

mathgenius··on Sinking of the US Cargo Vessel El Faro: Illustrated digest [pdf]
I'm curious how much this is about "many small and unlikely failures leading to disaster", versus "they sailed into a big storm and were doomed". The usual narrative with complex engineering disasters is the former. I'm wondering, for example, if everything else was going well with the ship, could they have survived such a close encounter with such a big storm? Or, if the engine was kept online, would that have changed anything? It seems to me that this situation went far beyond survivability, but it's hard to tell from the NTSB report.
mathgenius··on Lessons from My Math Degree That Have Nothing to Do with Math
I agree. Let me add another item to the author's list:

7. Most problems have no solution. Doing undergraduate mathematics you can always be sure that every question is well posed and has an answer somewhere. Once you start doing research, this is not the case at all. Problems without solutions are so prevalent, that asking the right question becomes the interesting thing, not the finding of the answer.

mathgenius··on Shortwave Trading: The West Chicago Tower Mystery
It's not amount of data but latency. A signal to buy is just one bit, but you need to get it before everyone else does.
mathgenius··on Three Decades Later, Mystery Numbers Explained
It's nice to see "tropical geometry" get a mention. This is closely related to Dijkstra's algorithm, min-sum message passing, etc.
mathgenius··on Tesla reviewing contractors, firing everyone not vouched for by an employee
> something is seriously wrong if you can't get at least one employee to vouch for you.

It's not just a "vouch", the language used is: "a Tesla employee putting their reputation on the line."

It's like the tesla-mafia, watch out or cousin Elon is coming for ya!

mathgenius··on Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps
I can see the evolution of this: ripe for machine learning disruption. Then in a few years all we have are AI bots chatting each other up, and then informing us who we are to mate.
mathgenius··on Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?
> Fundamentally, the history of a price has nothing to do with its future price.

This is not true at all. Price movements show auto-correlation, for example.

mathgenius··on Ask HN: Anyone making money through algorithmic trading?
> less than half of their forex traders are profitable

Slightly less than half are profitable. This seams reasonable. And how much of IB trades are done by algo trading? Probably not much.

mathgenius··on Using USB-VGA dongles as SDR transmitter
That's why the osmo-fl2k page has the following text:

"Before transmitting any signals with an FL2000 device, it is strongly suggested that you check the resulting spectrum with a spectrum analyzer, and apply proper filtering to suppress any but the desired transmit frequency.

Operating a transmitter with the unfiltered FL2000 DAC output attached to an antenna outside a RF shielding chamber is dangerous. Don't do it!"

mathgenius··on Iceland Takes Hard Look at Tech Boom Sparked by Its Cheap, Bountiful Power
But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.
mathgenius··on The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet
The Google search engine.
mathgenius··on The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science
I have met several "refugees" from particle physics, that left in part because of flimsy statistical methods. So let me ask: who is going to reproduce the experiment that found the Higgs boson?
mathgenius··on Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners
I'm not sure if this is open to the public yet, but if you really are interested you could post your questions here:

https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/

mathgenius··on Lessons on Bubbles from Bitcoin
Volume traded on CME futures has been insignificant until about two weeks ago [1]. Click on the chart icon and look at the volume bar graph. Each contract is worth 5 BTC. Looks like they are doing about 10,000 BTC per day now. So I don't agree with this article at all.

CBOE bitcoin futures is much smaller, but they are also doing about 2500 BTC per day [2].

[1] http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoi...

[2] https://markets.cboe.com/us/futures/market_statistics/daily/

mathgenius··on Robert Langlands, who linked number theory, analysis, and geometry (2015)
That john baez article is about something else.

Try this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.0955.pdf

mathgenius··on Robert Langlands, who linked number theory, analysis, and geometry (2015)
Right, but the dodecahedron is a modular curve, and I'm guessing this is how Hermite came up with the solution to the quintic using modular functions in 1858. If there are any real number theorists here they might be able to clarify this some more. Modular functions, modular forms, automorphic forms, these are all key ingredients of the Langlands program.
mathgenius··on Robert Langlands, who linked number theory, analysis, and geometry (2015)
Somewhat randomly, I've been working with a mathematician that has convinced me to study the Langlands program with him. I feel ill-equipped for the journey, having boycotted number theory ever since they tried to get me to learn the multiplication table. But on the other hand, there is plenty of geometry involved! Who would have thought that the dodecahedron is involved with solving the quintic? It really does seem like this area (the Langlands program) is at a vast nexus of many different branches of mathematics. It's intense.
mathgenius··on Robert Langlands, who linked number theory, analysis, and geometry (2015)
Here is Frenkel giving a talk on the geometric Langlands program [1]. I wouldn't say it is "accessible", but if you have seen some physics maybe give it a go.

[1] "What Do Fermat's Last Theorem and Electro-magnetic Duality Have in Common?" http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/bblunch/frenkel/

mathgenius··on The Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades
His description of the "emotional inertia" that sets in is most terrifying of all. It really gives a feeling for the fear that grips. Instead of saying "they were afraid" he shows it. Good writing indeed.
mathgenius··on Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job
Yes, total dick move. And who knows how high up the blame lies. The bottom-rung exec is likely just as clueless. Clearly they need to outsource the social media stuff. This is going to become more and more important for big corps to get on top of, and having a few click-monkeys do it is just obviously not going to work.
mathgenius··on Fractions in the Farey Sequences and the Stern-Brocot Tree
But fractions are also fiction: who says that one can be divided into two? That's just waiting around for inflation to kick in. And negative numbers: same. It's just hoping for a bigger number to subtract off from.

Only the natural numbers exist. All the rest is fantasy.

mathgenius··on Fractions in the Farey Sequences and the Stern-Brocot Tree
Working out the Stern-Brocot tree using modular arithmetic leads to some finite shapes because after a while the calculation repeats itself. For example, using mod 5 you get a dodecahedron! These things are called modular curves (iirc.) It's a little bit tricky to figure this out, one hint is that every fraction has two names a/b and -a/-b. In modular arithmetic this is important, eg. 2/3 == -2/-3 == 3/2. So every node of the tree has two labels. (Warning: I may not be explaining this very well.) Once you get to mod 7 you get a three-holed donut shape, called the Klein quartic.
mathgenius··on Fractions in the Farey Sequences and the Stern-Brocot Tree
The fractions in the Stern-Brocot tree approximate any real number. There's a statement about this that is equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis.
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