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Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

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Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#171

Post by not-my-account »

smokel wrote: post #167
not-my-account wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

totally! MuZero is my favourite[1] The super cool thing about MuZero is that it learns the dynamics of the problem, i.e. you don't have to give it the rules of the game, which makes the algorithm very general. For example, DeepMind threw MuZero at video compression and found that it can reduce video sizes by 6.28% (massive for something like YouTube)[2][3]. Curious if anyone else knows examples of MuZero being deploy…

> you don't have to give it the rules of the game To be fair, it uses MCTS, which requires many simulations of the game. For this, it needs to know which moves are valid, and when a player wins or loses the game. So it does need to know the rules of the game, but it doesn't need any prior knowledge about which moves are better than others.

Not quite, you can define an illegal move as losing the game, and winning/losing is a “meta-observation” - ie if the player wins/loses, you don’t invoke another search.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#172

Post by radlad »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

(Replying directly to increase the chances you see this.) I received a couple more responses, from Sunil Sarin and from Mark Dewitt. Sunil had this to say, which was certainly surprising to me:

> John, I'll have to look in my hard copy archives, which are very disorganized and will take me some time. But I don't believe you need this exact paper. I can probably point you at other papers that were in fact published (and are not just company TRs).

> Furthermore, our concoction of the acronym SHARD is different from "database sharding" as currently used. We were referring to the network, not the data, being "sharded", i.e., partitioned, and ensuring high database availability (with some loss of consistency - see "The CAP Theorem").

Mark Dewitt shared:

> Hi John, I believe that was an unpublished report we wrote for our DARPA funding agency. I may still have a copy, but it's currently buried under some stuff in the garage. There is at least one published paper that describes the SHARD architecture for a partially replicated database. It's not entirely obvious because I think the SHARD acronym didn't start getting used until after the paper was published in 1985. By 1987, Sunil Sarin had published another paper with Nancy Lynch in which they refer to SHARD and reference the 1985 paper.

> Here are the two citations:

> S. K. Sarin and N. A. Lynch, "Discarding Obsolete Information in a Replicated Database System," in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. SE-13, no. 1, pp. 39-47, Jan. 1987, doi: 10.1109/TSE.1987.232564.

> S. K. Sarin, B. T. Blaustein and C. W. Kaufman, "System architecture for partition-tolerant distributed databases," in IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. C-34, no. 12, pp. 1158-1163, Dec. 1985, doi: 10.1109/TC.1985.6312213.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#173

Post by liam0215 »

d-- wrote: post #55

"Enso: A Streaming Interface for NIC-Application Communication" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/0... We've been using the same API to communicate with our NICs since 1994. That API severely limits network throughput and latency. By simply changing the API (no new NIC) you can get 6x higher throughput in some apps and 43% lower latency. Code runs on FPGA NIC only for now: https://github.com/…

This is the best systems paper of the year so far imo

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#174

Post by vackosar »

DennisP wrote: post #114
javajosh wrote: post #91

I think you meant "recently published paper" but others are bringing up old stuff. I've always enjoyed Einstein's (translated) papers. They are both precise and readable, and his reputation for genius is well deserved! This one is interesting, "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" you can read here: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol3-trans/393 . This was his initial stab at GR. It…

The book Einstein's Lost Key by German physicist Alexander Unzicker is all about that idea and its history. Unzicker argues that it's still a good idea, hasn't been falsified since it makes much the same predictions as GR, and we should look into it further.

I read about criticism of General Relativity, that I haven't verified so grain of salt please. The criticism is in that the equations are so complex that only the simplest limits of them are studied and so the theory is therefore not verified.
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