It's much easier to work with LISP. It's functional, trees are easy to reason about. We're using an even more simplified language in this work. It's kind of like the MNIST for progsynth research. Scaling this to real and useful programming languages and domains is still non-trivial, and is a major drawback of our work here.
Yeah, this is true! These are more like expressions rather than programs. We were mostly following the language used by previous work, https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04604
Changing tokens in a program is not differentiable. For me, the key idea is that you can train a neural model to suggest edits to programs by randomly mutating nodes. And when you run this neural model, you get to make edits that are syntactically correct (i.e., a number will only replace a number etc.) according to a context-free grammar.
I wasn't talking just about the US, I think we need very high levels of vaccination everywhere to make it statistically not a threat. We need to control the spread of the virus to levels where it's not mutating at evolutionarily scales, _everywhere_, and the only way to effectively do that is vaccines.
It's not a threat at this very moment, for this very point in time, but since we're allowing the virus to spread at such evolutionarily scales, inside and outside the US, a new variant popping up that evades vaccines is statistically very possible, and pose a significant threat to my own and society's well being.
I'm trying to argue that this is not a personal choice issue, rather a public health one.
Of course, we can never stop all mutations. However, for mutations to be useful for the virus, they do need to happen at an evolutionary scale. Especially because we're lucky that SARS-CoV-2 mutates much slower than Influenza and HIV.
If the rate of transmission reaches the elusive herd immunity, the time-frame for the virus to evolve into evading vaccines grows significantly longer, even with a non-zero mutation rate.
Lastly, antibodies created via the mRNA vaccines have a broader binding affinity to different variants than those from natural immunity [1].
Again, the goal is to not eradicate, but to scale it down to the point where it is statistically not a threat.
Adding to the thoughts before, letting the virus spread and mutate among the unvaccinated to create a new variant sounds like a reset on the progress we've made. With the Delta we got lucky, our vaccines still largely work. I'm not sure how long the luck will hold on with more variants.
I'm all for leaving people alone to their own decisions. But with this, their decisions greatly affect me and society at large.