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Discussion of the Essence# programming language, and related issues and technologies. |
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From PhysOrg.com:
Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems - until now.Full article
From PhysOrg.com:
Pablo Parrilo, the Finmeccanica Career Development Professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, has developed a new set of techniques that make it easier to get a handle on nonlinear systems. Moreover, in many cases, his techniques provide algorithms — step-by-step instructions — for analyzing those systems, taking away much of the guesswork. “The impact he’s had has been huge. Huge,” says Russ Tedrake, a robotics researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tedrake has adapted Parrilo’s techniques to create novel control systems for walking and flying robots, and major engineering companies have used them in the design of aircraft and engines. Quantum information theorists have used them to describe the mysterious property known as entanglement — in which the states of subatomic particles become dependent on each other — and biologists have used them to make sense of the complicated chemical signaling pathways found in cells.Full article
From PhysOrg.com:
Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB, Germany), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.Full article
From PhysOrg.com:
In a study that elevates the role of entropy in creating order, research led by the University of Michigan shows that certain pyramid shapes can spontaneously organize into complex quasicrystals.Full aticle
'Saucy' software update finds symmetries dramatically faster from PhysOrg.com
Computer scientists at the University of Michigan developed open-source software that cuts the time to find symmetries in complicated equations from days to seconds in some cases.
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From Physorg.com:
In new work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lawrence and Carvalho describe a new class of statistical estimators and prove four theorems concerning their properties. Their work shows that these “centroid” estimators allow for better statistical predictions – and, as a result, better ways to extract information from the immense data sets used in computational biology, information technology, banking and finance, medicine and engineering.
Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians from PhysOrg.com
Mathematicians from the University of Exeter have solved the mystery of traffic jams by developing a model to show how major delays occur on our roads, with no apparent cause. Many traffic jams leave drivers baffled as they finally reach the end of a tail-back to find no visible cause for their delay.
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The Science Daily article "Fate Might Not Be So Unpredictable After All, According To New Mathematical Theory" reports on a new mathematical theory by which the mean "first passage time" of a randomly-moving object in a non-homogeneous environment can be calculated.
Calculating the mean "first passage time" (FPT) of an object that takes a random walk through a complex environment provides the average arrival time of the object at a specific destination in that environment. This is especially valuable information when either a) there are many objects talking the random walk at the same time, or b) the object will take the random walk many times repeatedly.
This new theory, if it proves to be correct, could be used to predict:
Is the answer 2,397,207,667,966,701? French 'mathlete' sets record from PhysOrg.com
French "mathlete" Alexis Lemaire showed off his rare mental agility Thursday, claiming a new world record after working out in his head the 13th root of a random 200-digit number in just 72.4 seconds.
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Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years from PhysOrg.com
A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton according to new research.
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In the paper The Mathematical Universe (PDF,) cosmologist Max Tegmark takes the (epistemological) position that the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) strongly implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH.) MUH holds that reality isn't just described (modeled) by mathematics, but that mathematics and reality are actually deeply equivalent.
The abstract of the paper says "I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Gödel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Gödel's sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems."
In another paper, Parallel Universes, Tegmark defines a taxonomy of different types of Universes (reminiscent of Georg Cantor's taxonomy of different types of infinities.) The existence of Type IV Universes would be a probable consequence of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.
In addition to making me think more deeply, and more outside the box, than anything I've read since encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky's essay Staring into the Singularity, these two papers by Tegmark strongly remind me of several things that may be deeply related:
