Recently, somebody shared on Twitter a new proof of the irrationality of √2. Its claimed advantage is that “it requires no knowledge of mathematics above the definition of what it means for a number to be irrational, and can be written almost in one line.” These claims are dubious: the usual proof, which I’ve…
Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23
The space is divided into four rectangles . Each of those rectangles is divided such that it contains a maximum of four children . Each child is either a point or a smaller rectangle.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a bunch of parameters to tune for a better result, but there were just too many to exhaustively search all possibilities? I recently saw a …
A brief introduction tutorial to Constraint Programming with Python, we introduce some relevant definitions and solve our old Pokémon Centers and Pokémon Gyms problem this time with CP!
Time for some hard-core geeking-out. This comment on HN by /u/jiggawatts struck me as a brilliant idea: it's an intuitive counter-example t...
A recent Twitter thread brought home to me that there is widespread confusion about what types actually are, even among the most prominent researchers. In particular: are types the same thing as sets ? At the risk of repeating some of my prior posts, perhaps it’s time for a little history about type theory, set theory…
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
