Searching for the numinous
🇦🇺 🇨🇦, now home in 🇺🇸
Researcher at the Astera Institute
Also active at: https://post.news/michael_nielsen & https://michaelnotebook.com
Michael Nielsen
@michael_nielsen
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- 126 Posts
A Lisp interpreter... implemented in the Game of Life: https://woodrush.github.io/blog/posts/2022-01-12-lisp-in-life.html
Supports macros & closures.
One of my favourite papers, an adversarial collaboration on the existence of psychic powers (between a believer and skeptic)
Shown: abstract, and a particularly amusing & interesting paragraph from the conclusion. The paper is very interesting. http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/staring1.pdf
I'd be fascinated to read a history of religion and capitalism, or a history of religion and technology
Leo Szilard on how to slow down science: https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science
Māris Ozols@michael_nielsen Btw, I consider any type of axiomatic characterization in mathematics as a form of discovery fiction.
For example, Shannon entropy was characterized by Faddeev as the only continuous function from probability distributions to real numbers that satisfies a very natural chain rule.
This is a simple way to motivate the entropy. The well-known formula with a logarithm then pops out of it by itself.
I first learned about this from a nice paper by Leinster:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06961
Entropy modulo a prime
Building on work of Kontsevich, we introduce a definition of the entropy of a finite probability distribution in which the "probabilities" are integers modulo a prime p. The entropy, too, is an integer mod p. Entropy mod p is shown to be uniquely characterized by a functional equation identical to the one that characterizes ordinary Shannon entropy. We also establish a sense in which certain real entropies have residues mod p, connecting the concepts of entropy over R and over Z/pZ. Finally, entropy mod p is expressed as a polynomial which is shown to satisfy several identities, linking into work of Cathelineau, Elbaz-Vincent and Gangl on polylogarithms.
@michael_nielsen Very nice essay! I also appreciate discovery fiction as a tool for gaining insight and for its didactic value in teaching.
I had the same experience with teleportation - I understood it properly only after writing a discovery fiction story for myself. I have two different such stories that I use to teach it to my students now.
Bob Coecke@MarisOzols @michael_nielsen
Dodo-book and my coming one are kind of entirely discovery fiction, in a pictorial universe.
Dodo-book and my coming one are kind of entirely discovery fiction, in a pictorial universe.
I continue to marvel that predict-the-next-word/token, with enough data and parameters, turns out to capture so much of human thought.
The Third and the Seventh: https://vimeo.com/7809605
This has been one of my favourite artworks since I first saw it, about 12 years or so ago. It's almost entirely computer graphics. But unlike most CG exercises, the point isn't really realism. It is the artist's eye.
Made by one person (Alex Roman).
