Turing machine decider Updated 2025-07-16
A Turing machine decider is a program that decides if one or more Turing machines halts of not.
Of course, because what we know about the halting problem, there cannot exist a single decider that decides all Turing machines.
E.g. The Busy Beaver Challenge has a set of deciders clearly published, which decide a large part of BB(5). Their proposed deciders are listed at: discuss.bbchallenge.org/c/deciders/5 and actually applied ones at: bbchallenge.org.
But there are deciders that can decide large classes of turing machines.
Many (all/most?) deciders are based on simulation of machines with arbitrary cutoff hyperparameters, e.g. the cutoff space/time of a Turing machine cycler decider.
The simplest and most obvious example is the Turing machine cycler decider
Ciro's Edict #4 / Not work Updated 2025-07-16
I caught and overcame a minor addiction to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
It does bring back the The Sims feeling from my teenage years, but with killer zombies added in.
I especially like going to sleep in that game, and how you need to setup a confy bed for it.
Some further comments at: Section "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead".
The way to quit is simple: delete your saves, then get annoyed with slowness of progressing back up, then use built-in debug/cheat menu to overcome that, then it's not fun anymore. This is a major advantage of single player open source games: addiction resistance!
Trapped ion quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
TODO understand.
Video 1.
Trapping Ions for Quantum Computing by Diana Craik (2019)
Source.
A basic introduction, but very concrete, with only a bit of math it might be amazing:
Sounds complicated, several technologies need to work together for that to work! Videos of ions moving are from www.physics.ox.ac.uk/research/group/ion-trap-quantum-computing.
A major flaw of this presentation is not explaining the readout process.
Video 2.
How To Trap Particles in a Particle Accelerator by the Royal Institution (2016)
Source. Demonstrates trapping pollen particles in an alternating field.
Video 4.
Introduction to quantum optics by Peter Zoller (2018)
Source. THE Zoller from Cirac–Zoller CNOT gate talks about his gate.
After something broke on the website due to SQLite vs PostgreSQL inconsistencies and took me a day to figure it out, I finally decided to update the test system so that OURBIGBOOK_POSTGRES=true npm test will run the tests on PostgreSQL.
Originally, these were being run only on SQLite, which is the major use case for OurBigBook CLI, which came before the website.
But the website runs on PostgreSQL, so it is fundamental to test things in PostgreSQL as well.
We know that superfluidity happens more easily in bosons, and so electrons joins in Cooper pairs to form bosons, making a superfluid of Cooper pairs!
Isn't that awesome!
Transmission electron microscopy Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Transmission Electron Microscope by LD SEF (2019)
Source. Images some gold nanopraticles 5-10 nm. You can also get crystallographic information directly on the same machine.
Lebesgue integral vs Riemann integral Updated 2025-07-16
Advantages over Riemann:
Video 1.
Riemann integral vs. Lebesgue integral by The Bright Side Of Mathematics (2018)
Source.
youtube.com/watch?v=PGPZ0P1PJfw&t=808 shows how Lebesgue can be visualized as a partition of the function range instead of domain, and then you just have to be able to measure the size of pre-images.
One advantage of that is that the range is always one dimensional.
But the main advantage is that having infinitely many discontinuities does not matter.
Infinitely many discontinuities can make the Riemann partitioning diverge.
But in Lebesgue, you are instead measuring the size of preimage, and to fit infinitely many discontinuities in a finite domain, the size of this preimage is going to be zero.
So then the question becomes more of "how to define the measure of a subset of the domain".
Which is why we then fall into measure theory!
The inaugural that predicted the Josephson effect.
Published on Physics Letters, then a new journal, before they split into Physics Letters A and Physics Letters B. True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen mentions that this choice was made rather than the more prestigious Physical Review Letters because they were not yet so confident about the results.
Intel GPU Updated 2025-07-16
Emscripten Updated 2025-07-16
Quantum threshold theorem Updated 2025-07-16
This theorem roughly states that states that for every quantum algorithm, once we reach a certain level of physical error rate small enough (where small enough is algorithm dependant), then we can perfectly error correct.
This algorithm provides the conceptual division between noisy intermediate-scale quantum era and post-NISQ.

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.