I'm going to read Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris", two connected novels, that in Spain have been translated and edited together. In both novels science and the scientists play an important role.
Cormac McCarthy was interested in science, and especially since he began to be vinculated to the Santa Fe Institute. The SFI is a research center that puts an emphasis on whole systems over reductionist approaches, its complex systems line of research is perhaps its most famous.
Cormac McCarthy was a close friend of one of the founders of the SFI: the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. In the SFI's own words: "Cormac and Murray discovered that they shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun and became fast friends."
What a great luck, to be surrounded by great luminaries, to be stimulated and learnt from them, and they from him! #literature#books#physics#complexity
Question to the physicists: phase transitions cannot be predicted from the behavior of individual particles, correct? Do physicists view this as "cooperative behavior"? Thanks.
Last week, I presented the work I did with prof. Kuldeep Meel and prof. Arunabha Sen at IJCAI 2023.
We showed the benefits of reducing a problem to a computationally harder problem (yes, you read that right!), by demonstrating how it allows us to solve much larger problem instances.
It was so much fun to finally share this work with so many fantastic researchers at IJCAI! Thank you to all organisers for making this conference possible. I'm also super grateful to the reviewers who gave us great feedback!
I sometimes explain to people why the so-called "Cynefin model" is utter crap. I usually start by giving them 1 very simple fact that is false about Cynefin. False as in blatantly wrong. Then something strange happens: People who "use" that model do not reflect, do not get thoughtful, they do not even argue!
Instead, they start talking about how they use that instrument and that it is "still useful". That it "makes people think".
See the irony?
But also about lots of other types of #creative endeavours. Some days it is just about being present with the uncertainty and with the unsolved problems
Question I find interesting: how meaningful is it to use “( \mathbb{Z}_2 )-semantics” for propositional logic? By this I mean interpreting true statements with the value ( 1 ) and false statements with the value (0)? We’d be able to interpret the conjunction connective with multiplication, the exclusive disjunction connective with addition, the inclusive disjunction connective with the sum of those two, and negation with (1) minus the base proposition’s truth value. The implication connective can be built as usual using negation and inclusive disjunction.
My motivation for asking: it seems as if this kind of “arithmetic semantics” should generalize nicely if we decide to use an arbitrary field of characteristic (2), not just (\mathbb{Z}_2). In what kinds of situations might something like this come in handy?
@bengrantmath actually, you can do this in any field or domain (or even ring, but that gets trickier). We study it all the time in algebraic proof complexity, which uses alegbraic approaches like these to try to understand the complexity of individual instances of (usually) NP-complete problems. Fun stuff!
COMPLEXITY SCIENCE. Talks from the Para Limes’ Illusion of Control conference are now online. I recommend the talks by Sander van der Leeuw (illusion of control), Terry Sejnowski (illusion of intelligence re AI), and especially Atsushi Iriki (cognitive roots of human’s innate illusion of control).
If you are curious about the novel results published in Science and Nature by the collaboration btw Meta and US academics, you might want to read #ComplexityThoughts
I try to build some background for non-experts of #ComputationalSocialScience and summarize the main findings.
Finally, I dig into the ongoing debate, covering existing documents and my chats with Sandra González-Bailón, Sander van der Linden, Pierluigi Sacco and others
This debate might be of high interest for self-organized decentralized platforms, such as #Mastodon and the #Fediverse in general
4-min interview w/ Tarjan on his inverse-Ackermann upper bound for the union-find data structure . Turns out he got a matching lower bound on that algorithm first - I didn't know about the lower bound before! Interesting story behind the path of research.
I asked it to write a Python script that when given a graph where there are no more than 5 edges for every vertex, it returns the length of the longest path that visits each vertex no more than once. Then lifted the edge count restriction.
In both cases it claimed polynomial time complexity to solve an NP-hard problem
"If you're unlucky and you just tried to pretend complexity could be avoided altogether, it has no place to go in this world. But it still doesn't stop existing."
My latest on Interplace dips into how Mandelbrot was inspired by earlier critics of Euclidian purity and how his fractured lines (fractals) better describe the natural world. @geography #complexity #fractals #physicalgeography
Great reflection by Lorenzo Benini at the European Environmental Agency's webinar on "Governance in complexity": navigating complexity is unlikely to be achieved by narratives of "acceleration", "scaling up" and the like. In fact, such narratives feed the spiral of failure and anxiety. Better narratives would be "healing", "reconnecting", "scaling deep".