172991548
submission
Baldrson writes:
Kaido Orav has just improved 1.38% on the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge with his “fx-cmix” entry.
The competition seems to be heating up, with this winner coming a mere 6 months since the prior winner. This is all the more impressive since each improvement in the benchmark approaches the (unknown) minimum size called the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data.
171454380
submission
Baldrson writes:
Marcus Hutters tweet makes it official:Before describing Saurabhs contribution, there are two salient facts required to understand the importance of this competition:
1) It is more important than a language modeling competition. It is knowledge comprehension. To quote Gregory Chaitin, "Compression is comprehension."
- Every programming language is described in Wikipedia.
- Every scientific concept is described in Wikipedia.
- Every mathematical concept is described in Wikipedia.
- Every historic event is described in Wikipedia.
- Every technology is described in Wikipedia.
- Every work of art is described in Wikipedia — with examples.
- There is even the Wikidata project that provides Wikipedia a substantial amount of digested statistics about the real world.
Are you going to argue that comprehension of all that knowledge is insufficient to generatively speak the truth consistent with all that knowledge — and that this notion of "truth" will not be at least comparable to that generatively spoken by large language models such as ChatGPT?
2) The above also applies to Matt Mahoneys Large Text Compression Benchmark, which, unlike the Hutter Prize, allows unlimited computer resources. However the Hutter Prize is geared toward research in that it restricts computation resources to the most general purpose hardware that is widely available.
As described by the seminal paper "The Hardware Lottery" by Sara Hooker, AI research is biased toward algorithms optimized for existing hardware infrastructure. While this hardware bias is justified for engineering (applying existing scientific understanding to the "utility function" of making money) to quote Sara Hooker, it "can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures".
Saurabh Kumars Contribution
The complaint that this is "mere" optimization ignores the fact that this was done on general purpose computation hardware, and is therefore in line with the spirit of Sara Hookers admonition to researchers in "The Hardware Lottery". By showing how to optimize within the constraint of general purpose computation, Saurabhs contribution may help point the way toward future directions in hardware architecture.
149055575
submission
Baldrson writes:
The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge has now awarded €9000 to Artemiy Margaritov as the first winner of the 10x expansion of the HKCP, first announced, over a year ago in conjunction with a Lex Fridman podcast!
Artemiy Margaritov's STARLIT algorithm's 1.13% cleared the 1% improvement hurdle to beat the last benchmark, set by Alexander Rhatushnyak. He receives a bonus in proportion to the time since the last benchmark was set, raising his award by 60% to €9000.
Congratulations to Artemiy Margaritov for his winning submission!
143232234
submission
Baldrson writes:
Marcus Hutter lowers the bar for The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge.
It has been a year since the Hutter Prize increased by a factor of 10 and there have been no new entries. By decreasing the compression threshold for a prize award by 5,000 bytes per day, Hutter hopes to increase the rate and fairness of prize awards, hence progress toward artificial general intelligence.
From the Hutter Prize FAQ:
Why do you grant a 'discount' of 5'000 Byte per day?The contest went big early 2020, but so far no-one was able to beat the baseline. The discount has been introduced to ease participation and guarantee eventually at least one winner. The discount is around 1.5% per year, so should allow a first winner within a year, or at most two. The reason for the incremental discount is to prevent a quick win by whoever notices the discount first.
125621194
submission
Baldrson writes:
First announced on Slashdot in 2006, AI professor Marcus Hutter has gone big with his challenge to the artificial intelligence community. A 500,000€ purse now backs The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Contestants compete to compress Wikipedia to its essence. The 1 billion character excerpt of Wikipedia called "enwik9" is approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.
Hutter's challenge is an advance over the Turing Test. Devised by the famous AI theorist, Alan Turing, a chat bot must be able to fool a human. It is pass-fail. Hutter's prize incrementally awards distillation of Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge to its essence. This judging criterion derives from a mathematical theory of natural science, informally known as "Occam's Razor". Formally it is called Algorithmic Information Theory or AIT. AIT is, according to Hutter's "AIXI" theory, essential to Universal Intelligence.
Hutter's judging criterion is superior to Turing's in 3 ways:
1) It is objective,
2) It rewards incremental improvements,
3) It is founded on a mathematical theory of natural science.
Detailed rules for the contest and answers to frequently asked questions are available.
117746800
submission
Baldrson writes:
Scott Shattuck at Medium.com reports: "TIBET 5.0 is now available." A dream? To some. A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS — particularly those counting on TIBET 5.0 to be the DukeNukem Forever of web application frameworks. See the introductory "Why TIBET?" tl;dr; video. Or the documentation and white papers for the literate. Or, the TIBET repo for the obsessive.
87598513
submission
Baldrson writes:
Close on the heels of Chemical and Engineering News' article "Cold fusion died 25 years ago, but the research lives on", Scientific American has published an article titled "Cold Fusion Lives: Experiments Create Energy When None Should Exist". Both of these articles prominently feature Brilliant Light Power's recent claims of reproducible, sustained, high-density power with 100x Coeffienct of Performance (COP). As Carl Sagan famously quoted James Oberg, "Keeping an open mind is a virtue but not so open that your brains fall out.." A quarter century ago the American Physical Society concluded, to a round of applause and laughter, that "cold fusion" was "incompetence and delusion". A year ago Idea Futures judged Cold Fusion false. Has Scientific American's brains fallen out of their "open mind"?
74453259
submission
Baldrson writes:
This is an interesting angle on relational programming: Relate a functional or even imperative language program to its outputs, provide constraints and then reverse to do fun things like generate all programs that say "I love you.", generate all Quines, etc. This is demonstrated in PolyConf 15: The Promise of Relational Programming / William Byrd. (The afore video link skips past the boring logic programming type stuff like reversible append.) But this is more than a mere novelty, as demonstrated in the final section of the presentation: Imperative programs (involving destructive assignment, error traps, etc.) can be interpreted under the relational paradigm to answer questions like, "What input conditions to this program yield this output condition?"
68646763
submission
Baldrson writes:
Politico.com reports that: "FBI agents investigating the Sony Pictures hack were briefed Monday by a security firm that says its research points to laid-off Sony staff, not North Korea, as the perpetrator...Researchers from the cyber intelligence company Norse have said their own investigation into the data on the Sony attack doesn’t point to North Korea at all and instead indicates some combination of a disgruntled employee and hackers for piracy groups is at fault." One wonders what Paul Graham has to say about the risk posed by "disgruntled employees" to Fortune 500 firms that follow his advice.
68465859
submission
Baldrson writes:
Kitco.com reports that: "Low energy nuclear reactor (LENR) technology, and by extension palladium, is attracting the attention of one of the richest men in the world and a pioneer inventor of new technology... In a recent visit to Italy, billionaire business man, investor and inventor Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR, and is a sponsor of companies developing the technology... During his trip to Italy he visited the national agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA) where scientists have made significant progress towards a working design for low energy nuclear fusion. The centerpiece of their design is the same as in Mitsubishi’s: palladium. Creating palladium foil with just the right parameters, and managing stress levels in the material was a key issue, one that the researchers at EMEA were able to resolve several years ago." This is controversial to say the least. For example one of the first (1994) Idea Futures claims was that a palladium cold fusion device could produce even a small fraction of that claimed by many researchers over the last quarter century. That claim is presently selling at 2% odds and the judgement deadline is next week.
64529947
submission
Baldrson writes:
The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter."
57239431
submission
Baldrson writes:
Perpetually in-flight "skytrains" with which smaller aircraft would temporarily dock to exchange passengers and cargo, ground-effect flying container ships ala the Hughes Spruce Goose (only bigger and not made of spruce) and vertical takeoff and landing supersonic business jets were among among the aircraft potentials of cold fusion technology presented at NASA Langley's ARMD Seedling Seminar, February 25, 2014 in a study titled "Low Energy Nuclear Reaction Aircraft" (Warning: Adobe Connect). One comment heard: "There is a similar initiative in Lockheed/Martin."
48946999
submission
Baldrson writes:
The New York Times reports: "An LCA is not an actual H1-B application rather an intent to hire an H1-B worker after an unsuccessful domestic search...Within the top 10 jobs, there are an estimated 134% more candidates nationwide than there were positions requested. Additionally, we found that domestic student enrollment in computer and mathematical graduate programs has grown 88% in the last decade, while foreign student enrollment has dwindled 13%. There does not appear to be a sudden mass shortage of educated domestic workers, rather a handful of outsourcing firms who file a majority of the LCAs and are uninterested in domestic candidates. 82% of the positions requested by the top 20 companies were requested by outsourcing firms."
46690925
submission
Baldrson writes:
Forbes technology contributor Mark Gibbs reports that: "I haven’t posted about Rossi and his E-Cat since last August simply because there wasn’t much to report other than more of Rossi’s unsupported and infuriating claims ... What everyone wanted was something that Rossi has been promising was about to happen for months: An independent test by third parties who were credible... much to my, and I suspect many other people’s surprise, a report by credible, independent third parties is exactly what we got. Published on May 16, the paper titled “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device” would appear to deliver what we wanted...And now, the big reveal the authors’ conclusions are (again, the emphasis is mine): ' if we consider the whole volume of the reactor core and the most conservative figures on energy production, we still get a value of (7.93 ± 0.8) 102 MJ/Liter that is one order of magnitude higher than any conventional source.'"
46665841
submission
Baldrson writes:
An energy revolution has been reported in a joint paper by scientists from Bologna University, Uppsala University and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, titled "Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device containing hydrogen loaded nickel powder." This is the long-awaited independent validation of the infamous "E-Cat" or "Energy Catalyzer" by controversial inventor Andrea Rossi. Quoting the paper: "Even by the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources."
