Links for 2021-10-10
Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? — “We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct. We compare it with other simple sorting algorithms, and analyse some of its curious properties.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01111
“Nothing else Elon Musk has done can possibly make up for how hard the "OpenAI" launch trashed humanity's chances of survival…Previously all the AGI people were at the same conference talking about how humanity was going to handle this together. Elon Musk didn't like Demis Hassabis, so he blew that up. That's the impact of his life. The end.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oEC92fNXPj6wxz8dd/how-to-think-about-and-deal-with-openai
How artificial neural nets failed in 1981 because of a lack of computing power: “Peter Norvig: So there were small things, but I think probably the biggest was the computing power. And I mean, I certainly remember Geoff Hinton came to Berkeley when I was a grad student in 1981, I think, when he talked about these neural nets. And we fellow grad students thought that was so cool. So we said, "Let's go back into the lab and implement it. And of course, there was absolutely nothing you could download, so we had to build it all from scratch. And we got it to do exclusive or, and then we got it to do something a little bit more complicated. And it was exciting. And then we gave it the first real problem, and it ran overnight, and it didn't converge, and we let it run one more day, and it still didn't converge. And then we gave up, and we went back to our sort of knowledge-based systems approach. But if we had the computing power of today, it probably would have converged after five seconds.” @gwern provides the following calculation to put this into perspective: "1981: Intel 8087: 50,000 FP64 FLOPS (5e4) | 2021: A100: 9.7 FP64 TFLOPS = 9,700,000,000,000 FLOPS (9.7e12) | 2d*24h*60m*60s * 5e4 = 8e09 FLOPS | 8e09 / 9.7e12 = 8e-4 = 0.8 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘴" https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/gradient-dissent/reports/Peter-Norvig-Google-s-Director-of-Research-Singularity-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder--Vmlldzo2MTYwNjk
A ‘Pacemaker for the Brain’: No Treatment Helped Her Depression — Until This https://web.archive.org/web/20211005035553/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/health/depression-treatment-deep-brain-stimulation.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
Filippa Lentzos on Emerging Threats in Biosecurity https://futureoflife.org/2021/10/01/filippa-lentzos-on-emerging-threats-in-biosecurity/
Microsoft uses reinforcement learning to make self-modifying malware https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.11542
Chinese government tries to define ‘ethical norms’ for use of AI https://ai-ethics-and-governance.institute/2021/09/27/the-ethical-norms-for-the-new-generation-artificial-intelligence-china/amp/
Brain surgery causes man to need 3 hours less sleep per day. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899325/
“Taken together, the results establish that….the longer two populations have been separated in the course of human history, the more they differ in terms of their economic preferences.” https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24291/w24291.pdf
Women make up big majorities of graduates in subjects with low wage returns (e.g. creative arts, psychology etc) and minority in high return subjects like economics and computing. Explains more than half the male/female graduate wage gap (of about 5%) at age 25. https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15657