Links for 2022-10-13
“After building on years of work from MILA, DeepMind, ourselves, and others, our AIs are now expert-human-level in no-press Diplomacy and Hanabi! Unlike Go and Dota, Diplomacy/Hanabi involve *cooperation*, which breaks naive RL.” https://twitter.com/polynoamial/status/1580185706735218689
Language models neurally align with the human language system after relatively modest training -- consistent with results in vision https://openreview.net/forum?id=g1SzIRLQXMM
3D-printed, ultrastrong and ductile alloys form nanostructures https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2022/09/msen-3d-printed-ultrastrong-and-ductile-alloys-form-nano-structures.html
“The effort is worth it, for when you’re done, you’ll understand one of the great discoveries of all time: why the world needs quantum mechanics.” https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/why-the-world-needs-quantum-mechanics/
On the impermanence of species: The collapse of genetic incompatibilities in hybridizing populations https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.14626
This is one of my favorite articles on the Internet. Intended for a general audience, it features a high density of important and thought-provoking ideas and concepts. https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5kv
“Lurk is a Turing-complete programming language for recursive zk-SNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge) that will enable new possibilities for SNARK proofs, blockchain consensus, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), decentralized apps, data integration with IPFS and IPLD, and more.” https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/introducing-lurk-a-programming-language-for-recursive-zk-snarks/
Meta's new virtual and augmented reality headset https://www.meta.com/de/en/quest/quest-pro/
"Recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis... we provide a theoretical synthesis that accepts the existence of genetic clusters consistent with certain racial classifications..." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275112448053
“The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (GMVH) suggests that males exhibit greater variance than females in their cognitive abilities. I present some relevant empirical findings and make a suggestion for how the hypothesis should be conceptualized and evaluated.” https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/understanding-greater-male-variability
Russia's "irrecoverable losses" in the war with Ukraine have just become known: according to an FSB source, that figure is 90K. This includes troops who were killed, went missing, died from wounds, or were disabled and cannot return to military service. https://meduza.io/en/news/2022/10/12/russia-s-irrecoverable-losses-in-ukraine-more-than-90-000-troops-dead-disabled-or-awol
High Representative of the EU: “First, we did not believe that the war was coming. I have to recognise that here, in Brussels, the Americans were telling us “They will attack, they will attack”, and we were quite reluctant to believe it. And I remember very well when [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken phoned me and told me “well, it is going to happen this weekend”. And certainly, two days later, at five o’clock in the morning, they started bombing Kyiv. We did not believe that this was going to happen, and we did not foresee that Ukraine was ready to resist as fiercely and as successfully as they are doing.” https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-ambassadors-annual-conference-2022-opening-speech-high-representative-josep-borrell_en