According to Anders (in his biography) the media showed the image the wrong way. When he took the photo, the moon didn't look like the horizon - it was rotated 90 degrees. :)

The impressive part of the work is the fact that they were able to print materials that control light so well, not the actual network itself. The weight optimization and topology design were still done using standard computing hardware - this is just a physical realization of a trained network. You could build something equivalent out of water and tubes (though it would be slower and wetter obviously). The cool part is the optical control which is now possible, not the fact that MNIST works.

Ghosting is a disturbing behaviour. The more often people do it, the more normal it becomes for people to stop checking in on each other when something goes wrong. If I suddenly "fell off the map", I would like society to look into it, and people not to default to "oh, he probably just ghosted us". As a human, you don't owe people an extended explanation for ceasing an online discussion or exchange, but I do think it one should end with at least a "No thank you", if only to maintain the social norm that we all should be concerned about each other's well-being.

Good point!!!

Fair enough, and thank you for the apology.

I guess what I meant is that when I write a simulation now, I know technically can't trust rand() to sample correctly. An accurate simulation of a random process, e.g. observation of superposition of eigenstates, requires that I have access to a stream of true random numbers from the outside world. If someone managed to do a true random experiment in this world, either we are in universe prime, or they tapped into /dev/random a level up (which is connected to a real random source).

Thanks for being so polite on the internet.

Can we use this result to prove that our reality is not a computer simulation (e.g. that we live in reality prime)?

IQ tests and the like suffer from cultural bias. So do these games. As an English speaking human who has been exposed to pop culture and movies, I know that movement from left-right is normal, the hero saves the princess (which is a problem and another discussion). I wasn't born with this bias. I learned it. It is silly to initialize a neural networks with random weights (as if it was just born) and then declare it learns slower than a human. Let a computer create a game where a normal human cultural bias don't apply and have an infant play. Then we will see a more accurate comparison.

Anytime I have tried to edit an article, my changes get reverted (without recourse) by a bot or some random wikipedia fanatic that refer to a set of rules I never agreed to or was consulted about. I don't have enough time in the day to deal with an internet edit war. If people want an easier to read article, change the edit policy.

It's actually pretty neat technology. I was impressed

If only that were true. Modern trade agreements have lots of rules about "internal" issues

How is this legal? Shouldn't WTO or trade agreements make this kind of government subsidy impossible these days?

If google wasn't the default, what search engine would iOS users actually use? My guess would be google. What other option is there? Bing? Yahoo? This sounds like a waste of 3 billion for Google.