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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 460 posts.
New pathfinding algorithm Oxyd Last week we mentioned the change to make biters not collide with each other, but that wasn’t the only biter-related update we released this past week. Somewhat coincidentally, this week’s updates have included something I’d been working on for a few weeks before – an upgrade to the…
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
An interactive introduction to grokking and mechanistic interpretability.
Another code golfing adventure.
Interpretability research decomposing a transformer layer into thousands of interpretable features that can steer model behavior.
We have solved a traveling salesman problem (TSP) to walk to 81,998 bars in South Korea. The problem was created using the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) to build a table of the 3,361,795,003 point-to-point travel times, one for each pair of bar locations. Our computation produced a tour together with a proof that…
[Thanks to Jacob Falkovich, Eric Neyman, and my LessWrong reviewer, among others, for their feedback on earlier drafts.] …
The Sophos Blog
Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade.
The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics.Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal.
A visual explanation of how threshold secret sharing lets any k of n shares recover a secret.
Introduction You may have heard of the Kelly bet allocation strategy. It is a system for correctly exploiting information or bias in a gambling situation. It is also known as a maximally aggressive…
We introduce FunSearch, a method for searching for “functions” written in computer code, and find new solutions in mathematics and computer science. FunSearch works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated “evaluator”, which guards…
Recent advances in quantum hardware and software have accelerated the timeline on which quantum attack might happen. Cloudflare is responding by moving our target for full post-quantum security to 2029.
This articles describes how Kalman filters and other state estimation techniques work, focusing on building intuition and pointing out good implementation techniques.
MIT’s Erik Demaine improves on his landmark, 18-year-old algorithm for generating origami folding patterns for any 3-D shape. The new work adds the requirement of “watertightness,” or minimizing the number of seams in an origami approximation of a closed surface.
Discovery of the 50th known Mersenne Prime.
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
I was struck the other day by the following: The cooking instructions on my Bob’s tri-colored quinoa package said to combine 2 cups of water with 1 cup of dried quinoa, which would ultimately create 4 cups of cooked quinoa. See image above. My first reaction was to believe …
When the central heating takes effect I'll get up and make myself some tea and porridge to which I'll add some nuts and fruit. I'll switch on The World Service to hear the news, and then make a few phone calls about damp-proofing. And I'll probably plant the daffodil bulbs for Spring (it says on the packet they should…
What is an algorithm ? It’s a sequence of steps that you follow to solve a problem. In everyday life, you might have an algorithm for hangin...
[Note: There is a followup to this post .] There has been a lot written over the past decade (and even longer) about problems associated with null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) and p values. Personally, I have found most of these arguments unconvincing. However, one of t
Mathematics Professor Gilbert “Gil” Strang taught his last class to thousands after teaching calculus, analysis, and linear algebra for more than 60 years at MIT and online. He reflects on his life at the Institute and as an instructor with MIT OpenCourseWare.
A complete guide to quantization: how LLMs store parameters as floats, why shrinking them to 4 or 8 bits barely hurts accuracy, and how to measure the tradeoff.
Let's review the most important math topics used by game devs, reflect about math education, and discuss techniques that can be used to improve the way we learn new math topics.
