Jepsen analyzes the safety properties of distributed systems–most notably, identifying violations of consistency models. But what are consistency models? What phenomena do they allow? What kind of consistency does a given program really need?
Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to the adversarial example phenomenon: all models tested so far can have their classifications dramatically altered by small image perturbations . The following predictions were for instance made by a state-of-the-art network trained to recognize celebrities :
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
Can 2.3728639 be best? Personal site; note puzzles Josh Alman is a graduate student at a technical school in the Boston area. He is working on matrix multiplication, among other problems in complex…
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
I first participated in Advent of Code (AoC) in 2017. My co-workers at Formlabs introduced it to me. This year (2018), quite a lot of Formlabs folks are taking part and we have a nice private leaderboard going. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I've been staying up until midnight to work on the problems as soon as…
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The geometry puzzles that are lighting up Twitter.
In the early days of computing, 1 + 1 didn’t always equal 10
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
Several JavaScript data structures such as Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap use hash tables under the hood. This article explains how V8 v6.3 improves hash table performance.
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
It breaks my heart to write this post because the puzzle in question was 1) very expensive and 2) given to me by someone very dear to me who...
Roughly speaking, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proven. When I was in 11-th grade, my geometry teacher Mr. Olsen, my friend …
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
· Read in · 1499 words · All posts in series · [dropcap]This[/dropcap] trick is unlike the others we’ve conjured. It will not reveal a clever manipulation of a probability or an integral or a…
For the past year, I’ve been working on implementing well known model architectures and building web applications, so I have a fair amount…
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
In this article, we explore the possibilities allowed by higher inductive types. They enable a much more intuitive formalization of integers and new mind-blowing definitions of the (homotopical) ci…
This is part one of a two-part article. Part two is here. A while back somebody told me to check out MiniZinc. Eventually I did and really enjoyed it, so figured I’d write about it here. This is actually going to be a two part article. Right now we’re talking about what it is and how it works, and in the next post…
How to solve linear systems that have many solutions, or those that have no solutions at all? That's the theme for a thick math textbook, of course, but from...
Map any 3D point on or above a triangle-subdivided sphere to a triangle index in constant time, without recursion, table lookups or complicated branching logic.
