Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Bibliography: discuss.bbchallenge.org/t/decider-cyclers/33

Example: bbchallenge.org/279081.

These are very simple, they just check for exact state repetitions, which obviously imply that they will run forever.

Unfortunately, cyclers may need to run through an initial setup phase before reaching the initial cycle point, which is not very elegant.

Also, we have no way of knowing the initial setup length of the actual cycle length, so we just need an arbitrary cutoff value.

And unfortunately, this can lead to misses, e.g. Skelet machine #1, a 5 state machine, has a (translated) cycle that starts at around 50-200M steps, and takes 8 trillion steps to repeat.

The United Kingdom is a great place to cycle in general as there's plenty of small country roads and interesting new small towns to discover, perhaps much like the rest of Europe, as opposed to the United States, which likely has some huge infinitely long straight roads with a lot of nothing in between.

Of particular interest is the large amount of airfields and small air raid shelters in the fields, an ominous reminder of world war 2. The airfields are in various states, from functional military fields, many converted to civilian usage, some have barely any tarmac left but still see usage. And some were just completely abandoned and decayed and became recreation grounds and farms. The UK is therefore also a great place to be if you want to learn to fly as a hobby!

Good starting point:

Next, you want to decide about nice destinations to reach/go through, and these are good ideas to look into:

Composed by Wang Huiran in 1960.

The Yi people are one of the 55 Chinese ethnic minorities officially recognized by the Chinese government.

His website is down as of 2020, shame: wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/english-universal-language

This dude is interesting. Quite crazy type. It is hard to differentiate genius from mad.

Ciro Santilli bumps on his Stack Overflow from time to time: stackoverflow.com/users/1269037/dan-dascalescu.

Official announcement: magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10

List of cards with images: www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-bans-7-cards-that-depict-racism-including-invoke-prejudice/

By Wizards of the Coast, parent company of Magic: The Gathering.

Reddit discussion: www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/h0kb84/depictions_of_racism_in_magic_aka_invoke/

A tiny idealized magnet! It is a very good model if you have a small strong magnet interacting with objects that are far away, notably other magnetic dipoles or a constant magnetic field.

The cool thing about this model is that we have simple explicit formulas for the magnetic field it produces, and for how this little magnet is affected by a magnetic field or by another magnetic dipole.

This is the perfect model for electron spin, but it can also be representative of macroscopic systems in the right circumstances.

The intuition for the name is likely that "dipole" means "both poles are on the same spot".

Like all big names in science, she was at the right place at the right time and with the right interest and passion.

Notably, the man she married, Pierre Curie, happened to be a the world master at precisely the technique that she needed to carefully measure radioactivity: he had the most precise electrometers in the world, which allowed to detect small amounts of radioactivity via the ionization of air by radiation . These used piezoelectricity, which Pierre Curie co-discovered with his brother.

Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:Seems simple, well done devs!

Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:gives:which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.

So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.

Some people considering Raspberry Pis also conclude obviously that it is useless at a 10H/s rate:

www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!

Of course those racist Nazis are a bunch of idiots, but how can you be surprised when freedom-of-speech focused tech gets used by them? www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking

Obviously, a few large instances dominate the user base for all practical purposes: kevq.uk/centralisation-and-mastodon/. And likely the network splits into hate-speech/non-hate-speech blacklist boundaries. And since the dominating closed networks will never lose user counts (???), the only instance that dominates will be the main hate speech one.

The flagship instance was mastodon.social and then in 2020 they closed signups for it and created a secondary mastodon.online.

The multi-instance thing is confusing and problematic. E.g. replies and likes might not show up across instances in some occasions: www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ynt7ta/is_there_a_way_to_see_post_replies_displayed_on/

The "advanced interface" feature is bad. Really bad. MacOS file browser inspired.

This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.

Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.

As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.

This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.

In simple terms, represents keystrokes of a piano, but it can likely also represent other effects (TODO confirm: bend, vibrato, slides, attack strength)

Can contain multiple parallel tracks as seen from the Wikipedia example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MIDI_sample.mid

You can see what it contains well with GUI music editor.

MIDI is fun. It is a basic high level representation of most instrumental music, including beats.

To actually listen to MIDI, you need a software synthesizer, which knows what sound to make for each note. One way to specify such instruments is the SoundFont file format.

Convert MIDI to more common standalone formats:

A charismatic, perfect-English-accent (Received Pronunciation) physicist from University of Cambridge, specializing in quantum field theory.

He has done several "vulgarization" lectures, some of which could be better called undergrad appetizers rather, a notable example being Video "Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)" for the prestigious Royal Institution, but remains a hardcore researcher: scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=felFiY4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate. Lots of open access publications BTW, so kudos.

The amount of lecture notes on his website looks really impressive: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html, he looks like a good educator.

David has also shown some interest in applications of high energy mathematical ideas to condensed matter, e.g. links between the renormalization group and phase transition phenomena. TODO there was a YouTube video about that, find it and link here.

Ciro Santilli wonders if his family is of East Asian, origin and if he can still speak any east asian languages. "Tong" is of course a transcription of several major Chinese surnames and from looks he could be mixed blood, but as mentioned at www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=tong it can also be an English "metonymic occupational name for a maker or user of tongs". After staring at his picture for a while Ciro is going with the maker of tongs theory initially.

Deep learning is the name artificial neural networks basically converged to in the 2010s/2020s.

It is a bit of an unfortunate as it suggests something like "deep understanding" and even reminds one of AGI, which it almost certainly will not attain on its own. But at least it sounds good.

github.com/deepmind/lab/tree/master/game_scripts/levels/contributed/dmlab30 has some good games with video demos on YouTube, though for some weird reason they are unlisted.

TODO get one of the games running. Instructions: github.com/deepmind/lab/blob/master/docs/users/build.md. This may helpgithub.com/deepmind/lab/issues/242: "Complete installation script for Ubuntu 20.04".

It is interesting how much overlap some of those have with Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games

The games are 3D, but most of them are purely flat, and the 3D is just a waste of resources.

Gridworld version of DeepMind Lab.

Open sourced in 2020: analyticsindiamag.com/deepmind-just-gave-away-this-ai-environment-simulator-for-free/

A tiny paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07027.pdf

Very similar to gvgai, Julian Togelius actually called them out on that: DeepMind Lab2D vs gvgai.

TODO get running, publish demo videos on YouTube.

At twitter.com/togelius/status/1328404390114435072 called out on DeepMind Lab2D for not giving them credit on prior work!As seen from web.archive.org/web/20220331022932/http://gvgai.net/ though, DeepMind sponsored them at some point.