Not quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innovation by millions of brilliant people.
Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?
I completed my degree in computer science at age 22 - at that time Shor had just published his famous algorithm and the industry press was filled with articles on how quantum computing was just a few years away with just a few technical hurdles yet to be solved.
I turned 50 years old this year, forgive an old man a few chuckles.
> An interesting article, especially given the links to the YouTube interview of Cornelius Lánczos. I've used the Lánczos algorithm for years for interpolation but until now I'd not put a face and voice to his work.
Indeed. What a fascinating and delightful memoir of a life in science! (I am envious of his ability to extemporize so flawlessly, in English, no less, which he says he acquired quite deliberately only after 1931, at age 38.)
Yeah, absolutely. Remember, Lánczos was one of those amazing Hungarian "Martians" whose intelligence seemed to defy all logic and reasoning.
I had a Hungarian physicist friend who unfortunately is now deceased who I used to rib over the brilliance of these Hungarian scientists. I'd ask him "what's in the water over there, what magic potion were they on?" and he'd just shrug his shoulders and say something like "I think it's the education system".
I can't say I was fully satisfied with his answers (although as I've just learned from the video on his life, Lánczos himself adds support for Hungary's strong education system).
I have read that underpromotion can reduce the risk of immediate capture: the opponent has a bigger incentive to take a queen than, say, a rook. Seems pretty marginal to me though.
It's better to force the opponent to capture than give him the choice of capturing or doing something else. If your opponent chooses not to capture the rook it's because he has found a move he thinks is even better than taking the rook. And that move is then something you should fear.
A big part of chess is maximizing your own choices and freedom while restricting your opponents choices.
Level 1, yes, this is the correct way of thinking. You should always take the highest scoring move.
However, Level 2, making a decision harder for your opponent, might force them to spent more time thinking about the decision. If for some reason there is an imbalance of pondering, this might be beneficial. Suppose that you knew X position would be reached before your opponent, so you had more time to study it, you know what the correct piece to take is, whether a promoted rook, or a previously existing rook, but your opponent doesn't yet, and crowning to a queen will force your opponent into a move without a thought.
The computer will sometimes do this, more because of randomness than strategy, but it is probably always the case that if they underpromote, you should take, it's like a tell of theirs. Perhaps there is a case for nash equilibirum where you must sometimes offer an underpromotion in a scenario where a queen would have been marginally better such that underpromoting doesn't signal to your opponent that they should take the piece (whichever it may be, I'm a bit dizzy)
Very theoretical, but not impossible that underpromoting in such scenarios might be beneficial, that said, very theoretical.
Why there isn’t a bigger business selling diamond stones for the kitchen is a mystery to me. Everyone has a honing steel but that won’t grind a new edge like a proper stone.
I think because people rarely even know what a sharp knife is. Once upon a time being able to sharpen a knife was a mandatory skill in life. Right now unless you are woodworker, leatherworker, hairdresser or professional cook - you rarely know what really sharp means. So you can't compare and demand better.
And with families getting smaller and takeout more popular - the prep work in the kitchen has reduced substantially.
Agreed. It's funny how only a couple of years ago we all told schoolchildren "stop citing Wikipedia, anyone can edit it, read an actual book!" yet now in this benighted era of AI we urge them to consult Wikipedia for "the truth" because it's not the hallucination of a machine.
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
Discussion about Wikipedia not actually being in financial jeopardy has been around for some time, and I remember reading about it at least once a year, during the donation banner season. Here are a few sources that discuss them.
One other benefit of indices is that they are ordered, whereas pointers in many languages (e.g. Go, but not C) are unordered. So you can binary search over an array of indices, for example, or use the relative sign of two indices to indicate a push or a pop operation in a balanced parenthesis tree.
Even if you allow "mix" to mean "pressure cook under 250 billion atmospheres at 15 million Kelvin", herbs contains too much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus to make a G-class star that tastes like our sun. So, yes.
LLMs are writing <1% of my code. I find it demoralizing to hear Google VPs endlessly boosting the end of programming as a job when the products fall so very far short of the extraordinary claims. It’s frankly insulting, and it must be terrifying for junior engineers.
I expect a massive bubble burst and recession in the next year or so, but honestly I cannot wait. I fear it will be quite a while before hiring picks up again, unfortunately.
I keep thinking of a friend in finance in pre-crash 2008 who could see the emperor had no clothes but was derided by his enthusiastic coworkers every time he opened his mouth.
I saw this at the time, but reading it again now what struck me is how coolly his correspondent responded, without escalation, hurt, or resistance; and no-one else chimed in to confront the attitude. In other words, this kind of aggression was acceptable. It's a real sign of how things have changed--for the better. As you say, Linus has since made strides, and it's not as if he was the only one; I used to do it too (if not nearly as egregiously) until various people I respected called me out for it. Now I shudder to recall what passed for normal 20 years ago.
Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?
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