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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?

#91

Post by javajosh »

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 was a simple approach, later abandoned, that considered light to slow down in a gravity well rather than remaining constant and specifying that mass warps spacetime. I suppose I like the idea that he pursued an idea that didn't work, and was forced to do something far more complex. It's kinda relatable.

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

#93

Post by mindcrime »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #86
mindcrime wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something that seems related. Maybe one of these authors would have a copy of the other paper? Not sure if they would be among the set of folks you've already tried or not... https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA171427.pdf

Interesting, thanks. Wonder if it was a coincidence that UO adopted that terminology, or if somebody there knew about this.

It's a good question. I mean, it's not entirely out of the question that the UO folks independently developed the same term without being aware of the SHARD research. But OTOH, it's entirely possible they were aware. Without talking to somebody that was there, I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

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

#94

Post by philipkglass »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #87
philipkglass wrote: post #78

"Liquid solution centrifugation for safe, scalable, and efficient isotope separation" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg8993 The authors show that a biological type laboratory ultracentrifuge can efficiently function as a near-universal isotope separator. Any element that can be dissolved as a salt in water -- the entire periodic table, excepting the noble gases -- can be enriched according to its relativ…

Surely something about the technique would make it impractical for enriching uranium though... you're not going to be able to produce kilograms of 20% U235 with this are you?

Not with off-the-shelf biological centrifuges, no. I don't know enough about centrifuge design to judge how easy/hard it is to build a 60,000 G centrifuge that can handle liters instead of milliliters of liquid per cavity.

The other even more exotic possibility is to use something like this to enrich ordinary reactor grade plutonium to weapons grade plutonium-239. The amount of mass to process with plutonium is orders of magnitude less because spent fuel plutonium is already more than 50% Pu-239, versus 0.7% U-235 in natural uranium, and a bare sphere critical mass of Pu-239 is only 10 kg vs 52 kg for U-235:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of...

The United States considered enriching waste fuel plutonium to weapons grade in the 1980s, when it contemplated another big nuclear weapons buildup against the USSR, but the laser based separation technology to be used was much more complicated than centrifuge separation. The project ended shortly after the USSR dissolved. It was called the Special Isotope Separation Project.

The 1988 environmental impact statement for the project gives some background information:

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f24/EIS-0136...

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

#95

Post by mindcrime »

antegamisou wrote: post #38
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…

> It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. According to Google Scholar, it's cited a measly 11 times . https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1491448744595502026...

While it may be fair to say the number isn't "hundreds" (or maybe it is?) I will say that I'd take that Google Scholar number with a grain of salt. Just poking around looking for stuff in the spirit of this sub-thread, I've found 4 or 5 additional documents that cite the SHARD paper, and which aren't on that Google Scholar list.

I've found that Google Scholar's coverage gets a little sketchy on older stuff, and since we're talking way back in the 1980's here, I don't think it's surprising that some things are missing.

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

#96

Post by cratermoon »

hirundo wrote: post #80
philipkglass wrote: post #76

"Co-cultivation enhanced microbial protein production based on autotrophic nitrogen-fixing hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858... Certain bacteria can directly assimilate a mixture of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen to produce protein. You could consider it an alternative to bacterial nitrogen fixation in root nodules with much higher productivity. Or you c…

We hear that eating vegetables is more efficient in ecological footprint than eating meat, since it cuts out the middle man. Is it yet more efficient to cut out the plants and get dietary protein from the bacteria that feed them?

Plants use water, sunlight, and organic chemicals. In plants, protein is made from soil nitrates. Bacteria don't feed the plants, but they can fix nitrogen from the air into the soil. If we really wanted to cut out the middleman, we'd turn the nitrogen we breathe directly into proteins. For now, we have to eat to obtain the essential amino acidd, Histidine; Isoleucine; Leucine; Lysine; Methionine; Phenylalanine; Threonine; Tryptophan; and Valine

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

#97

Post by morelisp »

mindcrime wrote: post #93
CamperBob2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks. Wonder if it was a coincidence that UO adopted that terminology, or if somebody there knew about this.

It's a good question. I mean, it's not entirely out of the question that the UO folks independently developed the same term without being aware of the SHARD research. But OTOH, it's entirely possible they were aware. Without talking to somebody that was there, I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

Raph Koster claims parallel invention of the term "shard" for separate worlds in MMOs. https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came...

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

#98

Post by not-my-account »

dargscisyhp wrote: post #21

I thought the AlphaZero paper was pretty cool: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815 Not only did we get a whole new type of Chess engine, it was also interesting to see how the engine thought of different openings at various stages in its training. For instance, the Caro-Kann, which is my weapon of choice, was favored quite heavily by it for several hours and then seemingly rejected (perhaps it even refuted it?!) near th…

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 deployed outside of toy examples?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.06626.pdf [3] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/muzeros-first-step-from-resear...

(edit s/Google/DeepMind)

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

#99

Post by claytonjy »

GregarianChild wrote: post #73
claytonjy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're conflating two things: shallow/classic ML is not symbolic AI. I'm not sure "ML" even encompasses anything "symbolic"; I see symbolic AI and ML as subfields with little overlap. I'm not saying symbolic AI has been GPU accelerated in the past, but that non-deep ML has been.

There is no agreement on the exact meaning of ML and AI. They are often used interchangeably. And for good reason, because it's all about getting computers to learn. We should not squabble about semantics. Can you point towards papers that report substantial GPU acceleration on what you call "non-deep ML"?

You're certainly right that AI/ML is often used interchangeably, though I think the distinction is pretty clear among practitioners: AI is the big circle, ML is a subset of AI, deep learning is a subset of ML. Symbolic AI is also a subset of AI, though I'm not familiar enough with it to say how much it interects the others.

So ML is AI, but just a small part of it.

As for papers, here's one showing GPU speedups for the 3 big GBM packages: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.04559.pdf. Their setup shows a 3-7x speedup for XGBoost.

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

#100

Post by klabb3 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #33
paxys wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really "mind blowing"? Knowing the competency of the average police department, I'd consider it more par for the course.

Novelty is overrated. Finding proof and pushing for accountability is so much more important.

Isn’t novelty also arbitrary and subjective? I recall when everyone seemed to think there was novelty in applying ML to X, where X was something very specific. “Look, it works here too!” I doubt that’s considered novel now.
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