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New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

quantamagazine.org

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Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#91

Post by smallerize »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #10
readthenotes1 wrote: post #3

Earlier today there was an article about neanderthal's rendering fat. The comments pointed out that anthropologist did not know that boiling was possible before the invention of pottery. Another comment pointed out that science teachers knew that it was possible because that was something they would do in class. Final comment was about how people ReDiscover things in different fields - - like the trapezoidal rule for…

I haven't read that thread, but I don't believe that anthropologists thought boiling was impossible before the invention of pottery. Here's one youtube video that demos a method for survival scenarios, I'm sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU . I know I don't have the context, but unless there are sources for the remarkable claim, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass "the laug…

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257 "Underlining earlier work by Speth (61), experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged (62)." Reference 61 goes to this 2015 paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=When+did+hum... "to alert archaeologists and others to the fact that one can easily and effectively boil in perishable containers made of bark, hide, leaves, even paper and plastic, placed directly on the fire and without using heated stones."

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#92

Post by prpl »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #50
dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

The correct option is to treat such conversations as a protocol with a negotiation at the onset.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#93

Post by watersb »

pests wrote: post #42
ars wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

Reminds me of the old videos on the Mill CPU architecture. There is multi hour long video about “the belt”, a primary concept in understanding the Mill architecture and instruction scheduling. It’s portrayed in the slides as an actual belt with a queue of items about to be processed, etc. Only in the end to reveal the belt is truely conceptualized and does not formally exist. The belt is an accurate visual representa…

https://youtu.be/QGw-cy0ylCc

Is this an asynchronous architecture CPU?

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#94

Post by Hnrobert42 »

prpl wrote: post #92
pseudocomposer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

The correct option is to treat such conversations as a protocol with a negotiation at the onset.

SYN ACK

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#95

Post by eru »

dkarl wrote: post #12
clickety_clack wrote: post #7

I have trouble explaining to my parents how my job is a real thing. I can only imagine trying to explain ‘I study shapes, but only ones that don’t jut inwards’.

I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…

There's more choices than three.

Eg you can focus on what you actually do, or you can focus on the benefits you bring to other people.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#96

Post by zahlman »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #50
dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

> or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing)

Intelligence, in the traditional sense, also involves understanding when to give up. Part of "emotional intelligence" is judging whether the other party actually cares about what you're about to say.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#97

Post by dietr1ch »

dkarl wrote: post #12
clickety_clack wrote: post #7

I have trouble explaining to my parents how my job is a real thing. I can only imagine trying to explain ‘I study shapes, but only ones that don’t jut inwards’.

I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…

> You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it.

What's wrong with this? Making it look easy is why you get paid for it.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#98

Post by slwvx »

deadbabe wrote: post #87

Can’t you just montecarlo the hell out of this thing?

I don't think so. You can't just "Montecarlo the hell" out of a post-quantum cryptographic scheme [1] which are also based on lattices. Even if that analogy isn't quite apt, I don't think looking for a good random lattice is a good way to find the densest possible lattice [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack#For_spheres

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#100

Post by dotancohen »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #33
dotancohen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you've already explored this, but is there some precompression operation that you could do to the vectors such that they're no longer sparse, and therefore relatively uniform?

They weren't sparse, they were dense but the "density" was quite non-uniform (think typical learned ML vectors). Not too far from an N-dimensional gaussian (I ended up reading research on quantizing Gaussian distributions, but that didn't help either as we didn't have a perfectly gaussian thing).

I see, thank you.

Another thing that I'm sure you explored, and I'd love to hear how it went, would be to rearrange the elements in the vectors such that perhaps the denser parts could be more contiguous, and the sparser parts could be more contiguous, on average. That sounds like something that would be easier to compress. Were the distributions such that a rearrangement like this might have been possible? Or were they very evenly distributed?

I.e. could you have rearranged a Gaussian-like distribution into a Poisson-like distribution?

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