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Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

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Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#31

Post by jiggawatts »

pipo234 wrote: post #8
Yoric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following: 1. Academics make discovery/invent something. 2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery. 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. 4. Academics teach discovery to their students. 5. Students get into industry. 6. Students get into position of t…

> 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. To be fair, sometimes academic inventions are impractical given the technical landscape du jour. They only become feasible as technology and society progresses, say 30 years. Also, your observation does not mean any invention is meaningful (and will eventually be recognized as such). I for one, learned a bunch of "impractical", "academic" no…

The specific issue with LDPC and Turbo Codes is that they both introduce latency, and require a ton of compute to decode.

If you don't care about latency and have an "unlimited" compute budget, then they're great and hence they were used very early for deep space communications. The speed-of-light delay means that there's minutes or even hours of latency anyway. And of course, the receiving station is a data centre with as much computer power available as you please.

In hand-held devices running on battery with latency constraints measured in milliseconds, it's an entirely different ballgame. Suddenly, there's real engineering problems to solve, and the trade-offs aren't always worth it.

Something I've told people when both 4G and 5G technologies rolled out is that these are enabled by the advances in the bleeding edge of silicon chip technology. Both rely on very heavyweight signal decoding algorithms that require dedicated "offload" circuitry almost as big as the main CPU!

Some anti-5G crazies think that their hand is getting hot from the "radiation", when in fact it is the decoding chip that's getting warm from the power it has to draw from the battery!

PS: This is why every new 4G/5G/6G/etc... tech always gets panned as impacting battery life. One or two silicon process shrinks later, this is not a problem. The radio power didn't change, but the decoding power did!

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#32

Post by [deleted] »

akhayam wrote: post #2

In 1993, two unknown French engineers claimed to have found a coding scheme to provide virtually error-free communications at data rates and transmitting-power efficiencies well beyond what most experts thought possible. Nobody believed them and set out to find the error in their paper... There was no error.

[deleted]

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#34

Post by cryptonector »

capitainenemo wrote: post #3

30 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…

Patent lifetimes are 20 years.

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#35

Post by Turing_Machine »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #13
Yoric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following: 1. Academics make discovery/invent something. 2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery. 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. 4. Academics teach discovery to their students. 5. Students get into industry. 6. Students get into position of t…

1.5 More established academics deride, scoff, and do their best to extinguish this new work.

Sometimes the academics aren't talking to each other, not out of spite, but just because they're in different fields.

I recall from a computer vision class that some of the early CV researchers wasted a lot of time redeveloping math techniques that had already been developed by the photogrammetry people literally decades before.

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#36

Post by akhayam »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #19
akhayam wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, wanted to share an interesting story of how great ideas can come from folks who are not the most popular names in a field. I feel the same will happen with AI now.

The thing to note here is that it's customary when posting an old article to HN to include the year in the title in parentheses.

Newbie error. Didn't realize that was the norm of the community. Tagging all older posts with the year now.

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#37

Post by Yoric »

hinkley wrote: post #24
readthenotes1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.5 More established academics deride, scoff, and do their best to extinguish this new work.

4.5 some of the less arrogant academics internalize the complaints about their solutions and iterate on it to make it 20% easier to use and/or 20% better in practice, making the cost of change more attractive.

Academics have different goals, metrics and incentives than industry, but I would seldom call academic work "arrogant".

In particular, iterating to make things easier may or may not be sufficient to get the industry to take a second look at the project, and there is a chance that it may consume enough of the academic's time to ruin their career in academia.

It's anecdata, but I have seen a few cases (e.g. Coccinelle) in which an academic essentially hides the fact that their contributions to e.g. an open-source project comes from academic research until after it has been battle-tested by industry.

Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)

#38

Post by Yoric »

bheadmaster wrote: post #25
Yoric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following: 1. Academics make discovery/invent something. 2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery. 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. 4. Academics teach discovery to their students. 5. Students get into industry. 6. Students get into position of t…

Wait, what exactly is metacompilation, and in what form is it used in the industry? I've tried searching the internet, but only found theoretical explanations I'm too tired to parse right now, and something about yaks and bisons.

Sorry, I meant multi-staged compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-stage_programming, e.g. MetaOCaml or Template Haskell.

And you're right, it may be a bit early to speak of it being used in the industry. Examples of subset of multi-staged compilation include `constexpr` in C++ and `comptime` in Zig. I also seem to remember seeing stuff in the GraalVM ecosystem but I can't find them right now.

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