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WEM (@index) told me to geek out about his Rules Ratio, so geek out I did! 🤓 Here's my article diving deeper into his idea:
https://blog.recommend.games/posts/rules-ratio/
https://www.wericmartin.com/the-rules-ratio-a-new-stat-to-geek-out-about/
The Rules Ratio: A New Stat to Geek Out About
How well do your favorite games measure up?https://www.wericmartin.com/the-rules-ratio-a-new-stat-to-geek-out-about/
This experiment (authored by several well-known mathematicians) revives an archaic practice (last seen in the era of Gauss) of posting encrypted proofs before revealing them: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192 . Here, the challenge is to see whether 10 research-level problems (that arose in the course of the authors research) are amenable to modern AI tools within a fixed time period (until Feb 13).
The problems appear to be out of reach of current "one-shot" AI prompts, but were solved by human domain experts, and would presumably a fair fraction would also be solvable by other domain experts equipped with AI tools. They are technical enough that a non-domain-expert would struggle to verify any AI-generated output on these problems, so it seems quite challenging to me to have such a non-expert solve any of these problems, but one could always be surprised. It will be interesting to see if there were any notable outcomes to this experiment by the expiration of the time linit.
To assess the ability of current AI systems to correctly answer research-level mathematics questions, we share a set of ten math questions which have arisen naturally in the research process of the authors. The questions had not been shared publicly until now; the answers are known to the authors of the questions but will remain encrypted for a short time.
Can You Grow Without Social Media? Board Game Beat Is About to Find Out
Board Game Beat is leaving conventional social media behind. Find out why, as well as how you can keep up with the news.What Things Looked Like Before Launch
Get a peek behind the scenes at the building of Board Game Beat
The current administration in the US has, through various funding agencies such as the NSF and NIH, has recently suspended virtually all federal grants to my home university, UCLA (including my own personal grant, although that is far from the most serious impact of this decision), on the grounds that UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”. One can certainly debate whether these grounds were justified, or whether they merit the extremely draconian damage to the very research environment that this decision is claiming to protect, but if nothing else this unprecedented decision does not appear to have followed the usual standards of due process for actions of this nature; for instance, there appears to have been no good faith effort by the administration to receive a response from UCLA to its allegations before implementing its decision.
The suspension of my personal grant has a non-trivial impact on myself (in particular, my summer salary, which I had already deferred in order to allow the previously released NSF funds to support several of my graduate students over this period, is now in limbo), and now gives me almost no resources to support my graduate students going forward; but this is only a fraction of a percent of the entire amount being suspended. A far greater concern is the impact on the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/, which despite receiving preliminary approval earlier this year for a new five-year round of funding (albeit at significantly reduced levels) from the NSF, now only has enough emergency funding for a few months of further operation at best if the suspension is not lifted. (1/4)
W. Eric Martin | Board Game Beat
Terence Tao
Simon Jaeger