Atomic Razor

Something's Strange in the System II: Vulcan

You see what I did there? Neptune was discovered in the 1840s in a heroic feat of applied mathematics and Newtonian gravitational mechanics by deducing its existence and location from anomalies in the position of Uranus. Mercury also demonstrated positional anomalies. So it seemed reasoned they were also caused by an so far unobserved planet. That turned out not to the case when Einstein came up with his new and better theory of gravitation, general relativity. But, still, why isn't Vulcan there? Perhaps it was there and got pushed into the Sun as planets migrated or perhaps it whacked into Mercury or, indeed, Earth. Given that we think of the Solar System as a largely static place, even though we have known for hundreds of years, that it wasn't, it's still hard to imagine planets migrating around. There might once have been a Vulcan or, at least, a planet between Mercury and the Sun.

Because there's no reason there couldn't be a planet now between Mercury and the Sun. It's a gravitationally stable niche and every other such niche in the Solar System is occupied. But no asteroids have yet been found orbiting between Mercury and the Sun and it's known that any such vulcanoids can be no more than 6 km across otherwise they would have been seen already. The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect can affect asteroids up to 100 km in diameter, so though the orbits might be gravitationally stable in practice, they might not be for both relatively large asteroids (though perhaps massive enough objects would be good) and small ones. THis might explain why there are vulcanoids observed at this epoch. Having said that, there might still be some and we can hope that there they will be discovered and visited in the upcoming Gold Age of Solar System Exploration (if we are spared).  

50 Projects

We are all trying to find ways to distract ourselves and I know I have posted this kind of thing regularly over the years because there's part of me that's attracted to this kind of thinking and others that will always let the rest of me down, but there's that voice that is saying here are all the things and I wanted to make things a little more concrete. It probably won't do any good, but I have to at least try or pretend to try and try. These are not in any particular order.

1. cataloguing all my books including ebooks
2. securely backing up ebooks and various electronic documents
3. digitising tapes and, possibly, CDs
4. finalising MSs of the first volume of The Mundanomicon and Eleven Short Stories About Love.
5. attend Hugo House Year-Long in Speculative Fiction course.  
6. read Anna Karenina.
7. build radio telescope.
8. get optical telescope and observe bright objects in an urban environment.
9. complete Udacity nanodegree in Deep Reinforcement Learning.
10. write AlphaZero/MuZero-style DRL system that plays Avalon Hill Baseball Strategy at a superhuman level.
11. write a Jupyter Notebook in Python that implements the Mongoose Traveller World Builder's Handbook methodology for generating stellar and planetary systems.
12. water feature in garden.
13. (West) Seattle book club.
14. research for Little, Big: On the Size of the World.
15. 5k/10k with Maddie.
16. golf with Maddie.
17. Seattle walks with Maddie.
18. wargaming with sandtable.
19. genetic engineering experiments.
20. RPG campaign: player.
21. RPG campaign: referee. 
22. run reasoning models on Nvidia Jetson/Project DIGITS computers and try and solve maths and physics questions.
23. exploring guided program synthesis including as part of the ARC Prize community.
24. Z- or N-gauge model railway.
25. homebrew cider.
26. cellular automata experiments.
27. drone experiments.
28. build your own liquid-fuelled rocket.
29. build your own computer out of a bag of transistors.
30. reread Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
31. write short stories.
32. write novels (especially The Visibilities).
33. "read for four hours a day."
34. experiments with Lego Architecture Studio.
35. watching Leonard Maltin **** movies.
36. visit US national parks.
37. learn go.
38. fanzine/journal with TeX.
39. Seattle cookery classes
40. Raspberry Pi or Arduino-based home automation projects/experiment with small-scale embedded computing systems.
41. design sustainable garden or permaculture experiment.
42. write a play or screenplay.
43. poetry course.
44. learn a new programming language (Go, Julia, Lisp, Rust).
45. create an annotated bibliography or research compendium.
46. experiment with biohacking or cognitive enhancement.
47. Carping On ("an Old Rectory production") podcast.
48. develop an interactive fiction story or text-based game.
49. create a personal knowledge management system to catalogue and link ideas, projects and notes across my various interests.
50. design and 3D print and my own miniatures for wargames.

OK, I had to cheat a little bit towards the end there and get some help from FM friends, but they are still pretty good ideas. I know, I know. We shall see.

A Cat's Nine Lives

A number of Chinese companies were showing humanoid robots at CES and apparently you can get one for $15k or so with about 2 hours of battery life. So, this is likely to be a thing soon, though, of course, there will be lots of different genera of robots, indeed, classes and phyla depending on their application. I don't necessarily want a humanoid robot yet, but I do want a robot cat. Advantages of a robot cat over a biological one:

1. can talk
2. doesn't crap and piss in a box or next door's garden\
3. doesn't moult
4. doesn't decimate the local wildlife
5. can probably see off a coyote or racoon
6. no dander, so no-one's sneezing
7. isn't an obligate carnivore and only requires the occasional jolt of 12V DC across ver electrodes
8. fur coat comes off and can be washed in the washing machine
9. doesn't get lost
10. doesn't scratch the furniture
11. can be used to spy on people
12. self-diagnosing
13. can be turned off as needed, so no cattery bills
14. can be programmed to behave in ways that suit you
15. plays well with children and other pets
16. doesn't go mangy
17. doesn't need neutering
18. potentially unlimited lifespan
19. software and hardware upgradable
20. with opposable thumbs, they can help with the cooking: https://www.reddit.com/r/SoraAi/comments/1ho6ifv/cat_cooking_made_with_veo_2/

Something's Strange in the System I: The Sun

In homage to G. Harry Stine's "The Alternate View" column in the legendary June 1983 issue of Analog, I am beginning a series on the strangeness in the system. Of course, in 1983, we didn't know anything about extrasolar planetary systems, so it wasn't all obvious how weird the Solar System was. Stine's point, as I remember it, was that something weird must have happened to the Solar System at some point. Now, we might wonder where are the Super-Earths and Mini-Neptunes, why are there are no gas giants close to the Sun or planets within the orbit of Mercury. But there are still plenty of issues that Stine raised that are relevant in 2025. We now know there are 400 billion or so planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy. How typical is the Solar System? Back in 1983, the Copernican Principle suggested that it must be fairly typical (see something like Carl Sagan's Cosmos). We now suspect that isn't the case, but given that every system is (probably) going to be as quirky as the Solar System and we have hardly done a comprehensive audit of the Solar System much less any other planetary systems, it might be a while before we can say anything definite. For instance, planetary systems at the centre of the galaxy or in the galactic bulge might be quite different to those in the outer regions of the galaxy. We can certainly characterise some things about some systems, but for the time being it's going to the foibles of the Solar System that are best known to us.

The Sun is usually described as an average star. But it's not really, it's much bigger than most stars (2-10x). It used to be thought that most stars were in multiple star systems and that such systems might not be able to have planets for angular momentum reasons, but we now know that multiple systems can have planets and that most systems are singletons, apparently. The Sun though might still be unusual as a singleton given its mass compared to the stereotypical M-class singleton. Of course, *is* the Sin a singleton?  Yes, what about Nemesis?We've known about Proxima Centauri and Barnard's Star since the early C20th. If there were a companion to the Sun wouldn't we have detected it decades ago? Both Proxima and Barnard's Star had very high proper motions that gave them away. Nemesis wouldn't, so it wouldn't appear to move in the sky. A late M-class star could have lurked out there unseen. Could as such a object would be brighter in the infra-red (as, indeed, would a brown dwarf) and all-sky IR surveys, such as IRAS (yes, indeed, I know) from the 1980s and later shown up nothing, which is a bit of disappointment. There is some suggestion that most or all stars are twins at birth, but if that is the case Sol's sibling is long lost. There are plenty of other factors that can disrupt the Oort Cloud, quasi-periodically or not, so it looks like the Sun's single status is something slightly strange. 

We don't have to worry about the solar neutrino problem these days, but there is some suggestion that that the Sun has a higher than typical metallicity for star of its age and class. According to Claude:

The Sun's metallicity is actually somewhat higher than typical for stars of its age and spectral class in our local cosmic neighborhood. Our Sun has a metallicity of about Z = 0.0134 (or [Fe/H] ≈ 0), which means about 1.34% of its mass consists of elements heavier than helium.

Which might be significant for the kinds of planets and thus for life in the Solar System. It's the only star we've got for the time being, but I would still like to one day experience the light of other stars and know just how commonplace our star is for certain. Bring on the exploration of the galaxy.

At Least It is a Plan of Sorts

I have been approved by my household CFO to get a Nvidia Project DIGITS personal AI supercomputer. This will supplement the Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. I am hoping that the Jetson will arrive before May as it will allow me to get started. Supposedly, the Project DIGITS machine should be available in May. We shall see. But obviously I cannot spend all my time doomscrolling One of the ways I'm going to navigate the coming Time of Troubles is using the Project DIGITS and Jetson machines to research into

• program synthesis
• reasoning models
• Foundation Models
• CUDA (originally Compute Unified Device Architecture, a Nvidia proprietary parallel computing platform and API that allows software to use certain types of GPUs) for accelerated general-purpose processing)
• Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Cellular Automata
• Artificial life models
• simulation of physical systems

Obviously, there's a lot of other things that I want to do as well as we discussed here both recently and over the years and decades. But the thing I need to do it position myself with enough knowledge to get a job where I can do this sort of thing during my working day and get paid for it. I am hoping that at some point in the year or two I can get to join a company that is doing things with the proverbial data centre of Nobel Prize winners. I know, I know, but I have to have some hope. Perhaps then things can really get started. 

The Galaxiads

Look at this beauty! 

By ESO - http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1330a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27491069

To quote the AAB description of this image

Spiral galaxies are usually very aesthetically appealing objects, and never more so than when they appear face-on. And this image is a particularly splendid example: it is the grand design spiral galaxy Messier 100, located in the southern part of the constellation of Coma Berenices, and lying about 55 million light-years from Earth. While Messier 100 shows very well defined spiral arms, it also displays the faintest of bar-like structures in the centre, which classifies this as type SAB. Although it is not easily spotted in the image, scientists have been able to confirm the bar’s existence by observing it in other wavelengths. This very detailed image shows the main features expected in a galaxy of this type: huge clouds of hydrogen gas, glowing in red patches when they re-emit the energy absorbed from newly born, massive stars; the uniform brightness of older, yellowish stars near the centre; and black shreds of dust weaving through the arms of the galaxy. Messier 100 is one of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster, which is the closest cluster of galaxies to our galaxy, the Milky Way, containing over 2000 galaxies, including spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars. This picture is a combination of images from the FORS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile, taken with red (R), green (V) and blue (B) filters.

Which is a rather wonderful piece of writing. 

But this wasn't the galaxy I saw on NASA APoD the other day thanks, indirectly, to Del. So, why did I think of M100. I mean this is an amazing galaxy, about 55 million light-years away, it is ~166 kilo-light-years in diameter, so why a bit bigger than the Milky Way. That might suggest it's 2-3x more massive than the Milky Way, but who knows. It's depleted in hydrogen because of  interactions with the intracluster medium of Virgo, so perhaps it has fewer stars than you would expect. Still, how will we be able to say we know the world until we have a complete audit of M100? (Yes, it would probably take billions of tears to get there.)

Nearer to home is the galaxy I actually wanted to talk about, the Southern Pinwheel, M83, another absolute beauty.

By CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab) & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) - The Outskirts of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=156389522

The AAB again:

Twelve million light-years away lies the galactic masterpiece Messier 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. Its swirling spiral arms display a high rate of star formation and host six detected supernovae. This image was captured with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.

This is much closer galaxy, APoD states that it's only ~40,000 light-years across, but AAB gives ~116 kilo-light-years, so go figure. Either way, it's amazing to contemplate everything that has ever happened there. Are there civilizations there, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic? Has anyone there ever studied and wondered about the Milky Way. It seems too awful to imagine they have not.

University of Life

If the population of the US is about 5x that of the UK and Harvard takes about 1500 undergraduates a year compared to 6000 at Oxford and Cambridge, it must, to first approximation, leaving aside issues like legacy admissions, be 20x more difficult to get into Harvard than Oxford or Cambridge. Of course, there are other Ivy League schools (Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University) plus several other universities that might be considered comparable (Caltech, MIT, Stanford). A further complicating factor are liberal arts colleges that don't have much or anything in the way of  postgraduate programmes. There is no equivalent to this in the UK. A difficulty then for us is how to understand how the university entry system works here. My experience is with the UK in the 1980s. Clearly, lots of people who were good enough to go to Oxford or Cambridge didn't because they were put off by the entrance exam. As I recall acceptance rates were something like 50% in the 1980s, but lower these days. In the US, there's no limit on the number of universities you can apply to and you can apply to lots of Ivies if desired. There seems to be a great deal of focus on extracurricular activities whereas here it's just academics.   

A 2001 list of Public "Ivies"

Northeastern

• Pennsylvania State University (University Park)
• Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey)
• State University of New York at Binghamton
• University of Connecticut (Storrs)

Mid-Atlantic

• College of William & Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia)
• University of Delaware (Newark)
• University of Maryland, College Park
• University of Virginia (Charlottesville)

Western

• University of Arizona (Tucson)
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of California, Davis
• University of California, Irvine
• University of California, Los Angeles
• University of California, San Diego
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• University of Colorado Boulder
• University of Washington (Seattle)

Great Lakes & Midwest

• Indiana University Bloomington
• Miami University (Oxford, Ohio)
• Michigan State University (East Lansing)
• Ohio State University (Columbus)
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• University of Iowa (Iowa City)
• University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
• University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• University of Wisconsin–Madison

Southern

• University of Florida (Gainesville)
• University of Georgia (Athens)
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Texas at Austin

which is a lot of universities and even more campuses, although it sort of feels about right. It we consider the University of Washington

For the Class of 2025 (enrolled fall 2021), UW received 48,840 applications and accepted 26,121 (53.5%). Of those accepted, 7,252 enrolled, a yield rate (the percentage of accepted students who choose to attend the university) of 27.8%.

This doesn't seem very selective to me, but perhaps I am missing something. The undergraduate class is about 4x that of Harvard and I suspect that it's harder to get in the CS programme these days. But it's very hard to know what it would be like to be an undergraduate at UW, now or in the 1980s, or whether if one were living in Seattle as a high schooler, one would want to go there. My dad was an aircraft engineer. Seattle is Jet City, although the Americans he worked with on the Phantom where from MacDonnell-Douglas out of St Louis. But if one were in Seattle or St Louis in the 1980s, where might one have chosen or been able to go?    

 

 

The Thousandth and One Philosophy

François Chollet has announced his AGI startup:

Today, the acceleration of scientific progress hinges on one factor: AI capable of independent invention and discovery. This capacity is the gateway to advancements beyond our wildest imagination.

Which sounds a lot like Amodei or Hassabis. Which is probably no bad thing. Chollet has a reputation as if not an AGI sceptic, an AGI realist. But if he things there's an approach worth trying that's definitely interesting. That's quite different thing from writing a wrapper library for TensorFlow. His company is called Ndea and you can apply to be part of its journey without CV or covering letter. Well, I guess they would ask you for a resume at some point. Sadly, I suspect my (joint) patent and 1997 PhD thesis aren't going to cut the mustard. But it does incentivise me to upload my PhD thesis to my GitHub.

I have for many years said that we should let a thousand philosophy's bloom. Chollet's idea is guided program synthesis:

We believe program synthesis holds the key to unlocking AGI. Instead of interpolating between data points in a continuous embedding space, program synthesis searches for discrete programs, or models, that perfectly explain observed data. This allows it to achieve much greater generalization power with extreme data-efficiency, requiring only a few examples to learn.

Apparently this is something all the big labs are working on now, but it's still an immature field; Chollet suggests it's comparable to Deep Learning in 2012. There's an AAB article on program synthesis, but it doesn't look terribly helpful. 

On Bluesky, Chollet states

I've been talking about some of these ideas -- merging "System 1" deep learning with "System 2" program search, on-the-fly knowledge recombination in the face of new tasks, lifelong learning, autonomous abstraction generation -- since 2017. 

So, we are looking at combining

• "System 1"
  • Deep Learning
•  'System 2"
  • Program search
  • On-the-fly knowledge recombination in the face of new tasks
  • Lifelong Learning
  • Autonomous abstraction generation

This at least gives me a goal to understand at least something program search and something to try and do with the Nvidia Jetson, if it arrives, or the DIGITS, if I can get one. Combining a reasoning model with a program synthesis system sounds like a fun project. Are there any actual resources yet though on program synthesis. There surely must at least be survey papers mustn't there? Perhaps this is royal route to PhD-level AI skills... 

Missing In Action

I had a massage last evening, which was why I didn't emit a blog. I am not sure how much better I feel for it, but I would probably feel worse if I hadn't had it. Which is like Dry January. I am definitely sleeping better, but it's hard to say I feel better. But I do know that I would feel worse if I were still drinking (this month; all bets off next, natch).

But here's the thing. How do you feel good? Not in the sense of not bad, but in terms of actually good? It's the same as enjoying something. There's lots of things I like, but how does one enjoy something as an unmediated experience? How does one find something that is so engaging that you would rather be doing that than something else? Some of it is concentrating on stuff. It's harder these days with the internet, but it's not like we didn't used to have books and magazines to distract when we were watching the telly. I can remember Civilization being a way of time-travelling into the future in 1992, but I have never been able to get FreeCiv to work and I probably don't have the patience to play it these days even if I could. Is there anything, at 56, for which the thing is more engaging than the idea of the thing? This links to the idea of whether you enjoy reading or having read. If you could download a book instantly into your brain and assimilate it somehow, would that be as good as actually spending hours reading the book. I feel there's at least a short story in that. 

TOPS, POPS and EOPS

Apparently my Nvidia Jetson is still on back order, at least I got another email about it, so that is good. Although who knows when it might arrive. As I have said, it supposedly delivers up to 67 TOPS. I am guessing those are INT8 ops or possibly FP4. The DIGITS, which I want, of course, has up to 1 petaflop at FP4. Or 1 POP. Which vaguely assumed me. I mean, one casually thinks, 67 TOPs, 67 billion operations per second. That's a lot! Then you realise, no, it's 67 trillion operations per second. The DIGITS is 1 quadrillion operations per second. At that point words have almost lost their meaning. Better, perhaps, to write 10¹⁵ operations per second. I mean, flipping heck.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supercomputers-history.svg#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg   

Moore's aw (broadly construed) is a remarkable thing as we can see here. In 1995, the most powerful computer had a performance of about 100 Gigaflops. The 500th fastest, which would have been a beast, 1 GFLOP. That's 67,000 times slower than the Jetson and a million times slower than the DIGITS. The fastest computer in the world currently is El Capitan, manages ~2 EOPS, so perhaps 20 million times faster than the fastest machine in 1995. That's 24 Moore's law generations, so the doubling period here is just over a year, although the 500th fastest and cumulative compute metrics indicate the period has lengthened over the years. It's still remarkable and I am hoping that we shall that trend reversed over the next few years. It is, as I have said, one of the few things that keeps me going.