This was interesting thanks - makes me wish I had the time to study your examples. But of course I don't, without just turning to an LLM....
If for any of these topics you do manage to get a summary you'd agree with from a (future or better-prompted?) LLM I'd like to read it. Particularly the first and third, the second is somewhat familiar and the fourth was a bit vague.
This proposal requires exponential energy! But you can factorize numbers with only one photon (a tiny amount of energy). Oh yeah, you’ll need an exponential number of modes (you just build a very-low-loss interferometer that does the unitary transformation corresponding to Shor’s algorithm on those modes).
Is finding exponentially inefficient ways of factorizing interesting?
Surely Wofram deserves the Nobel as much as Hopfield and Hinton? Not for this stuff of course (which I doubt many take seriously), but because he also provided us with an amazing computational tool without which physics would be very far behind where it is today?
[And at least I knew his name already unlike our current laureates whom I just had to look up!]
This year is an exception because of the AI Gen AI Artificial Intelligence AI AI zeitgeist.
If we keep giving the physics Nobel to people building computer tools, soon it will have to be renowned physicist Linus Torvalds, whose computational platform underlies every big physics experiment.
I'm not sure physicists would be thrilled if we keep going in that direction.
I think this is one of the rare times I feel comfortable speculating that had he not created Mathematica than someone else would have.
There was a demand and plenty of people with interest.
He was just in the right place with the right set of skills to execute on it before others and won the market in its infancy. Also it's a small enough market that the like of Mircosoft didn't feel the need to come in and crush him like they did Lotus 1-2-3.
I suspect you are right - but multiple Nobel prizes have gone to people who got there only very slightly ahead of others in the race. Would be tough to argue that there are many prizes which are for work that wouldn't have been done within a decade of when the winner actually did do it.
That particular proposal was mathematically wrong for reasons I still find physically perplexing (it turns out that for some events quantum theory allows for stronger memory records - defined via classial mutual information - of entropy decreasing events!). A simple example is in here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1726
(I am second author).
Random question from a very-much-not-computer savvy person on the off chance someone cares to answer: If a tiny charge was levied every time a webserver delivered a page to me would it cure this kind of problem? I'm imagining e.g. my browser has to send some crypto of some variety (or guarantee that it will in the future so as to not slow things down).
I work in cybersecurity and we need to be able to get info about CVEs extremely quickly from all major software vendors. The problem is this means we need to either subscribe to websites for webhooks (async notifications sent to us when an event happens) or poll a website. It turns out that polling is extremely inefficient, but is how it works most of the time because most of the websites we watch don’t support webhooks/push style notifications.
We create bot traffic, but we don’t want to. The problem is that the data we want isn’t available when we want it (we can’t wait days/weeks for the central CVE db to unembargo CVE records which have high impact) and isn’t delivered to us. Instead, we have to go through lots of effort to go get it. So we create a resilient crawler. And other similar companies / entities do too. Now we are all competing to get the same info in a short time, so we poll the sites too often. This all becomes a stress on the websites we hit.
All because the info should be open, but the companies with the info don’t want to build the most efficient system to distribute it. And there is probably legal liability for a middleman company to just crawl those websites and build a shim webhook system to push data as soon as it is found to webhook subscribers.
No because the bots are running on compromised machines, so they'd just steal the real owner's micropayments.
It'd also entrench search monopolies even harder, because everyone would exempt Google/Bing because they want to get indexed, but they wouldn't exempt other bots like the one you need for your new engine.
This was actually an idea that came along with the original internet. Coined “micropayments,” it was an idea to enable content consumers to pay content producers. A little bit (fractions of a cent) times a lot of people was the gist of it.
A subscription model is a better business than a tiny charge, because expenses will be the same, but ROI will be much larger. Even with subscription, many web services are not profitable.
Micropayments never took off. Advertising / freemium did. Why?
If your server doesn’t serve responses unless someone pays, then there is the problem of uncertainty for the client — how do I know the content behind the paywall is worth it?
Nearly all of the services we use that index the web are free/cheap and require the ability to crawl the web without logging into services. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu. LLMs like ChatGPT piggyback on CommonCrawl, in addition to paying for large expensive data contracts from companies like Reddit.
We have a word for the part of the internet that is walled off from open crawling — the Deep Web.
>I really wish textbooks with open licenses would take over and they could be reworked and improved year after year by different people
Could anyone explain to me how they think this might work in practice?
I am presently producing an undergrad textbook in quantum theory. I have two motivations: 1. IMO the "qubits first" (ie teach finite-dimensional QM before wave mechanics) approach to introducing the theory is superior (basically only Feynman did it of all the "classic" books) and 2. I'm involved in third world education and I want the book to be freely downloadable.
Now its a lot of work despite having taught the course multiple times and produced comprehensive lecture notes etc. Once its done I am sure I will not have the time to keep updating it, expanding on the problem sets and so on. A former student on the course is helping with the conversion and he will be a co-author, but like me he sees it as a service not at all about producing a product. So I think we're both very open to the idea of such "open license".
Given all that here are the kinds of questions that immediately arise:
- Mechanically how should one make the book available for such re-working? Put the source files on github? (Not something I've ever used, but I know roughly how it works).
- Via what mechanism does someone get to be credited for work they might do on better versions?
- Who decides what is the current "definitive" or "best" version? I will have a separate website for the book so I guess new versions can be announced there. But one way or the other I won't be involved forever.
- QM is fraught with crackpots, people who have whacky ideas on how to explain things and so on. Can they be prevented from "taking over", rewriting large chunks into (what I would view as) nonsense and so on? Note that presumably my name would still be associated with the new versions, so the issue is primarily not lending credence to stuff I fundamentally disagree with, not that they shouldn't be allowed to go do their thing.
- We will make a POD service available for purchasing hardcopies, the (expected to be small) royalties from which would be donated to third world physics/math education. Is there some license that can ensure any subsequent use of the material is also similarly non-profit?
I can see some (though not perfect) analogies with open-source software, so perhaps someone here has useful ideas about this kind of thing already...
Given access to repeated uses of a coin of unknown bias "p" (which is not 0 or 1) you can (eventually) always generate a new coin flip with bias given (exactly) by:
If for any of these topics you do manage to get a summary you'd agree with from a (future or better-prompted?) LLM I'd like to read it. Particularly the first and third, the second is somewhat familiar and the fourth was a bit vague.