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Comment Re:British slang (Score 1) 75

Apparently "boffin" is a British slang term for a scientist/engineer.

I recently watched a documentary on the British space program, and I recall someone saying something like "this project needs more engineers and fewer boffins". So "boffin" is specifically a scientist in an ivory tower, much like "egghead" in US slang.

Comment Re:"the most likely scenario is that it doesn't wo (Score 1) 75

29 is prime, and people don't usually talk about factoring primes because the factors are trivial.

I don't think Microsoft will let something as trivial as primality to get in the way of their quantum computing research. REAL men can roundhouse-kick any number into factors if they so desire.

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (1995)

Comment Re:Do not trust "quantum safe" encryption (Score 1) 35

Good points. I'm no expert in the field, but I've taken master's level courses in the relevant math and physics. I particularly remember my math professor saying that no encryption has been mathematically proven safe. We only know the current schemes are safe insofar as nobody has published an attack yet.

We do know how to break certain classical encryption schemes with hypothetical quantum computers. This clearly doesn't mean other schemes will stay quantum-unbreakable forever, because people keep inventing new algorithms. So "quantum safe" only applies in a very limited sense, until the day they are broken.

Comment Re:400MW what? (Score 1) 89

Is thet number thermal output or Electric? I'm no expert put afaik it's a rather significant difference

Net electric, it's in the fscking summary:

Overall, the present design of ARC is expected to produce about 1.13 GW of fusion power, with 500 MW of that extracted as electricity. Some of that (100 MW) will be needed to power the plant's operations, leaving 400 MW to be sent to the grid.

Comment Re:This will push formalisation into the mainstrea (Score 4, Informative) 58

AI can easily write the lean for any proofs they do. The problem is that lean is missing large parts of established mathematics.
My current lean project has to cite all of these externally due to missing lean support.

    Functional equations / means
    - lit_aczel_1948 — Aczél: symmetric + homogeneous means power/quasi-arithmetic mean (the CES forcing)
    - lit_aczel_1966_weighted — weighted Aczél characterization (weighted means)

    Fixed-point / topology
    - lit_brouwer_1911 — Brouwer fixed point
    - lit_cellina_approximate_selection_1969 — approximate selection (closed-graph correspondences); with Brouwer
      Kakutani
    - lit_glicksberg_1952 — Glicksberg fixed point (infinite/Bayesian games)
    - lit_berge_maximum_theorem_1959 — Berge maximum theorem (upper-hemicontinuity)

    Probability / large deviations
    - lit_sanov_1957 — Sanov / method of types (large-deviation rate = KL)
    - lit_fisher_tippett_gnedenko_1928 — extreme-value theorem (GEV limit laws)
    - lit_kolmogorov_1931_fokker_planck — Fokker–Planck diffusion equation

    Optimal transport / matching
    - lit_sinkhorn_1967 — Sinkhorn matrix scaling (entropic OT)
    - lit_lp_strong_duality_1951 — LP / transportation strong duality (Gale–Kuhn–Tucker)
    - lit_entropic_penalty_cominetti_sanmartin_1994 — entropic-penalty -convergence (T0)
    - lit_gale_shapley_1962 — deferred acceptance produces a stable matching
    - lit_gale_shapley_proposer_optimal_1962 — proposer-optimality of deferred acceptance

    Stochastic calculus / PDE
    - lit_ito_1944 — Itô's lemma
    - lit_black_scholes_pde_solution_1973 — closed-form solution of the Black–Scholes PDE
    - lit_liouville_dirichlet — Liouville/Dirichlet (harmonic-function / PDE result)

    Dynamical systems
    - lit_saddlenode_passage_time — saddle-node "bottleneck" passage time / (Strogatz/Fenichel)

Comment Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score 2) 166

I was also thinking of https://xkcd.com/323/, specifically the part "You can't just give a team of coders a year's supply of whiskey", because that's what AI coding looks like to me. Instead of giving devs just enough rope to hang themselves, we're now giving dilettante coders the keys to the entire rope industry.

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