Links for 2021-10-14
The most influential living person you have never heard about: Wang Huning — “And the fingerprints of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable. While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.” https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
Researchers have turned DNA into a minuscule hard drive https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/10/intracellular-recording-data-to-dna/&fj=1
Monkey Plays Pac-Man with Compositional Strategies and Hierarchical Decision-making: “…we show that the monkeys developed a set of strategies to simplify their decision-making and play the game. To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1445595637689454592.html
Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild (Science Robotics, 2021) youtube.com/watch?v=m89bNn6RFoQ
A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abf8136
Partial success in closing the gap between human and machine vision https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07411
Is Curiosity All You Need? On the Utility of Emergent Behaviours from Curious Exploration — “Applying an off-policy curiosity method to robotic manipulation and locomotion yields impressive emerging behaviour.” https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/Is-Curiosity-All-You-Need-On-the-Utility-of-Emergent-Behaviours-from-Curious-Exploration
Rover images confirm Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake https://news.mit.edu/2021/rover-images-confirm-jezero-crater-ancient-martian-lake
Creating Wireless Signals with Ethernet Cable to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Systems https://thehackernews.com/2021/10/creating-wireless-signals-with-ethernet.html (see also: axisofordinary.substack.com/p/a-superhuman-ai-will-break-your-security)
A new biography explains the genius of John von Neumann https://archive.is/iZDKm