Computational fun :D

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 02:48:35 GMT

For a really good joke, I have a strong reading recommendation for my fellow computing freaks as well as anyone even remotely into math. (Starting page 199, 'Quantum Disavantage') It's a lovely response to the guys at IBM (Kim et al., 2023) who did a quantum computing thingy that got quite a lot of media attention. They also claimed it was impossible to do this stuff on a 'regular' computer, which was refuted within days and caused a few shitstorms (not least because it's rude to publish this kind of claim in Nature without releasing a preprint on arXiv first... Manners, manners!) in the modeller scene. Now, someone... took this as an opportunity to bring out the good old Commodore 64 for entertainment. I love it. It's totally worth it for the photo of the 'experimental setup' alone, but really, the whole thing is quite funny. (Of course, anything published by The Association for Computational Heresy usually is.) :D :D :D

Also found in the same volume (page 398 ff) is a really lovely Toki Pona paper ('Toki Pona and Orders of Semantic Completeness') - everybody's favorite language, right?!?

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Divination algorithm <3

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 20:38:20 GMT

So, this is basically... a math-y reading recommendation? Prompted by something mostly unrelated in a Discord chat that reminded me of all the ways divination and computer modelling can interconnect. (And not just in the way I use runes and tarot cards for math-y brainstorming; that's not divination at all.) Anyway. One of my favorite publications in recent years is this one:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7387702
It's called "I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence Analysis" and it's a perfectly serious paper, and one that I want to cite in my own work very badly; I just can't find a justification (yet) for doing so. (The topic is close enough to what I work on, just this type of algorithm I've never implemented, nor will I do so in the foreseeable future. Too bad.) The authors developed their lovely algorithm based on the traditional Chinese divination system of I-Ching which I unfortunately don't know enough about to make any intelligent comments... Just: this is not only creative and fun, but actually good (from the algorithmic side of things).

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