cevi

9 ms·

1.
by cevi 5d ago
Finitism doesn't escape anything, it just gives you the illusion of safety. Any intellectually honest thinker should accept the possibility that 10 is a nonstandardly large number.
2.
by cevi 5d ago
Mochizuki's claimed proof of the abc conjecture was extremely unusual for the reason that nobody was able to extract a single useful idea from the argument. I was starting grad school when it came out, and my immediate visceral respons
3.
by cevi 5d ago
I grew up in a cult. Based on my experience, I believe that the most dangerous thing a human can do is to allow someone else to do their thinking for them.
4.
by cevi 6d ago
Nothing makes me respect Terry Tao more than the line "I hate Jean Bourgain" handwritten into the margin of one of Bourgain's papers. IYKYK
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by cevi 6d ago
When writing math papers, many (but unfortunately not all) mathematicians go through a post-processing step, where they take their ideas and proofs, and try to reduce them to simple and reusable core ideas that can be understood by the read
6.
Simon Claims Polynomial-Time Quantum Algorithm for Lattice Problems(postquantum.com)
2 points by cevi 1mo ago|0 comments
7.
by cevi 6mo ago
https://qntm.org/perso
8.
by cevi 7mo ago
I saw it as a sort of science-fiction - imagine living in a world where the smartest intellectuals all struggled to solve basic exercises about graph theory. Really imagine living in such a world - would you not feel frustrated when you tri
9.
by cevi 8mo ago
For learning the theory behind quantum computing, I usually recommend Watrous's lecture notes [1] - they start out by immediately giving a helpful analogy to ordinary probabilistic computation. The online tutorial [2] is a good followu
10.
by cevi 9mo ago
Are you also uncomfortable with the idea of flipping 256 unbiased coins independently?
11.
by cevi 11mo ago
There is no general procedure for computing upper bounds on busy beaver numbers (this can be proven). We haven't even come close to enumerating all of the interesting six-state Turing machines, so right now we don't even have a wi
12.
Cookie Clicker Ultra (introduction to googology)(olsak.net)
2 points by cevi 11mo ago|0 comments
13.
by cevi 1y ago
I've only skimmed the paper, but this looks very nice: the construction is very simple (aside from the precise choices of the parameters), just the analysis to show that it works is difficult. (I bet the construction can be refined - i
14.
by cevi 1y ago
The consistency of ZFC is (presumably) a theorem of second order PA, and ZFC is unable to prove it (unless ZFC is inconsistent).
15.
by cevi 1y ago
Unfortunately no, ZFC isn't good enough to capture arithmetical truth. The problem is that there are nonstandard models of ZFC where every single model of second-order PA within is itself nonstandard. There are even models of ZFC where
16.
by cevi 1y ago
Speaking as someone from the math community: 90% of the time, when we get a request like this, there is some form of mental illness involved. We aren't psychologists, so we tend to handle that really poorly. Well, let's take a loo
17.
by cevi 1y ago
"For instance, global pharmaceutical companies are advancing both disease research and the frontier of quantum-enabled drug discovery. And in automotive and aerospace, companies are using quantum computing to improve the performance of
18.
by cevi 1y ago
The (actual) article has a fairly detailed literature review in the introduction, and makes it pretty clear that the main idea was sort-of known already if you squint - but it looks like nobody had put the whole theory together elegantly an
19.
by cevi 1y ago
Think about it: with 20% tariffs, we will now have the option to work 14 hour shifts for 60c a day!
20.
by cevi 2y ago
If the discrete logarithm problem is NP-hard, then I will eat my hat. The discrete logarithm problem can be solved by Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer, placing it in the complexity class BQP. Anyone who claims that BQP contains a
21.
by cevi 2y ago
There are plenty of mathematicians - mostly set theorists - who are actively working on finding new axioms of mathematics to resolve questions which can't be resolved by ZFC. Projective Determinacy is probably the most important exampl
22.
by cevi 2y ago
The error rate of human mathematical work is not zero, but it does go down exponentially with the amount of time that the mathematician spends carefully thinking about the problem. Mistakes tend to be the result of typos, time pressure, or
23.
by cevi 2y ago
When you get good enough at mathematics, you can tell if your proofs are correct or not without asking a TA to grade them for you. Most mathematicians reach this level before they finish undergrad (a rare few reach it before they finish hig
24.
by cevi 2y ago
I always recommend Watrous's lecture notes: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf I prefer his explanation to most other explanations because he starts, right away, with an analogy to ordinar
25.
by cevi 2y ago
MIT's PRIMES program does exactly this - they give advanced high school students a mentor who picks out a problem, gets them up to speed on what is known, and then they work on the problem for a year and publish their results. It tends
26.
by cevi 2y ago
If the Hanoi pieces alternate in color, there is another very easy algorithm: always avoid putting two pieces of the same color directly on top of each other. I noticed this by accident while watching someone else solve a Hanoi puzzle with
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Four Levels of Voting Methods(hiveism.substack.com)
2 points by cevi 2y ago|0 comments
28.
by cevi 2y ago
Have you tried to read any of the literature on the Risch algorithm? If you haven't, you might want to get started by taking a look at the paper "Integration in Finite Terms" by Rosenlicht [1] and chasing down some of the ref
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by cevi 2y ago
Reminds me of "Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators" [1] [1] https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~bender/newpub/2007-BenderClT...
30.
by cevi 2y ago
Watrous's notes get straight to the point, with a good analogy to ordinary probability theory: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/QC-notes/QC-notes.pdf

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