markgall · HackerTrans

vor 20 Tagendiscuss

Is this really a big debate? I am in the similarly-named (but apparently distant) field of algebraic geometry and have never even heard of geometric algebra. Certainly I know about Clifford and exterior algebras, but this debate has never reached me.

markgall

vor 25 Tagendiscuss

Probably the most general-purpose one is SageMath, which is open-source and basically Python with a ton of sophisticated math stuff built into it. Everything I used to do in Mathematica I now do in sage, and I don't think I'm the only one. Probably field-dependent though.

Of course there is a whole constellation of more specialized things in certain fields, that has come a long way in the last 15 years. So people needing things like that no longer kludge things together in Mathematica.

markgall

vor 25 Tagendiscuss

Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.

markgall

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

As others have said, very common. A famous example is Lyrica, which made an enormous amount of money for Northwestern, probably around $1 billion dollars. It played a not-insignificant role in the university's rise in the last 10-20 years.

Universities love this and encourage it. Any big place will have an office of "technology transfer" or similar to help researchers make this happen.

markgall

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I only skimmed the article, but I think the idea is to use some variation on:

f(a,b,c,d,e) = the largest real solution x of the quintic equation x^5 + ax^4 + bx^3 + cx^2 + dx + e = 0

There's not a simple formula for this function (which is the basic point), but certainly it is a function: you feed it five real numbers as input, and it spits out one number as output. The proof that you can't generate this function using the single one given looks like some fairly routine Galois theory.

Whether this function is "considered elementary" depends on who you ask. Most people would not say this is elementary, but the author would like to redefine the term to include it, which would make the theorem not true anymore.

Why any of this would shake the foundations of computer engineering I do not know.

markgall

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Can anyone provide a link that "Some are going as far as to suggest that the entire foundations of computer engineering and machine learning should be re-built as a result of this", or anything similarly grandiose?

I am a professional mathematician, though nowhere near this kind of thing. The result seems amusing enough, but it doesn't really strike me as something that would be surprising. I confess that this thread is the first I've heard of it...

markgall

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I didn't know most of this, but eagerly await my pre-order!

markgall

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

> Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time. You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite. Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away."

> Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.

Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.

markgall

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

What? I am living in one of these places right now. The rate of road deaths is vastly higher than even in the USA. This is not a good model.

markgall

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Is this really true? I played a few games with it in August. It's not very good.

It's one of those old programs where 95% of the moves are pretty strong. But if you just do nothing and sit back it will occasionally make a random blunder and then you grind it out. I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders.

I'm only about 2000 on lichess but I beat it pretty much every time, especially once I realized there is no reason to try anything sharp.

markgall

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

I still have my old PowerBook G4 from 2005, with some not-that-old Debian currently installed. Every time my main laptop goes out commission, I get the G4 back out and use it for a few days. It's good enough for most of my work, though modern web-browsing is a challenge. (Maybe one that somebody has solved, I haven't dug at all.)

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