Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277596

Points: 1

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Proposed changes are :

## minimalist interface I wanted the quiz to show up in the middle of an otherwise empty screen, kind of like with what is done in the so called "distraction free" editors.

## only two results per quiz For various reasons I don't like the typical 5 possible notations (hard, difficult, normal, mild and easy or something like that). So only two possibilities : either you know the answer, or you didn't. So only two keys to press : enter or space.

## A different spaced-repetition algorithm. The most ambitious parts. I want to experiment using softmax and a somewhat complicated (but easily customizable) scoring system that would be entirely based on the activity log. Very much a work in progress, so far.

1. https://github.com/tallguyjenks/fla.sh

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284299

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Possibly a strech, but transistors are basically current amplifiers, so their optical equivalent should be... lasers. Indeed lasers are optical amplifiers. Whether or not they can be turned into logic gates as transistors can, I don't know.

For anyone who's excited about mechanical computers, perhaps it is worth reminding that an electron is about a thousand times lighter than a nucleon. Therefore, it's probably fair to say that mechanical computers will always be more energy consuming than electronic ones, because they fundamentally need to move atoms around to operate.

I am moderately happy with my results so far, but during this process I've learned a lot about how memory works, and about the various techniques that are used to improve it. However, it seems to me that none of these techniques, apart from the space repetition method, works well with chess.

Don't get me wrong: the space repetition methods is great, but I can't help wondering if I could not make it work even better. How could I use the method of Loci? How could I turn a chess move or position into an image that would be more vivid than a mere chess board which, to be honest, I can't really visualize very well? In other words : how can I "encode" a move in a way that has nothing to do with chess?

So called memory champions are amazingly good at memorizing long sequences of numbers, so the question is : how could I turn a sequence of chess moves into a sequence of numbers? If I could do that, all the experts methods to memorize numbers could be used seemlessly to memorize a chess opening repertoire.

Then I thought about this recent video someone made about the rarest chess move[2], and I started analysing my current repertoire (the one that used to be on memchess.com) to see how many chess moves it contains. To my suprise, it was just about five hundreds, which is much fewer than what I expected.

Here are the ten most common moves (half-moves, really) of my white repertoire, along with their number of occurrences:

    d4    13147
    Nf3   12848
    O-O   12562
    Nf6   12278
    e4    10430
    Nc3   10323
    d5     7540
    c5     7431
    e6     7276
    c4     7207

So, here is what I think could work. A preliminary task would be to memorize the list of half-moves, in decreasing order of frequency. In the list above, for instance, d4 would be the first entry, thus the number 1, Nf3 would be 2, d5 would be 7 and so on. I think it's important to sort the list in decreasing order of frequency so the numbers to memorize are as small as possible, thus achieving some sort of compression. When this list is memorized, one just has to use common mnemonics techniques to memorize each opening lines, turning them into a list of numbers and memorizing them with the method of Loci, the major/Dominic system or something like that.

Thoughts?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661497 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40636883

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845793

Points: 1

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I am fairly certain the number of legal transformations in mathematics is not infinite. There is a finite number of axioms, and all proven statements are derived from axioms through a finite number of steps.

The case of music is quite fascinating. YouTuber Rick Beato is following it very closely. He seems to think that quite soon people will listen to AI generated music even knowing it is AI-generated music. They will listen to it because they'll enjoy it and they will not care who or what made it. I personally think he is right. Music can be enjoyed in a way no other art can, in that sense it might become kind of a drug.

Now some people think that will never happen because AI music will always be bad, but recently he posted a video in which he tells us that his kids can immediately tell an AI-generated song from a normal one. He is baffled because he himself can't do that. But he also tells us that one of his kids thinks that he probably won't be able to tell it anymore in six months or something. In other words, a young person with such a good ear is confident that AI-generated music will soon be if not good, at least indistinguishable from human-made music. I think that's indicative of where things are going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbo6SdyWGns

That'd be nice, but eventually what will happen is that the human will submit a mathematical conjecture, the computer will internally translate into something like Lean, and try to find either a proof or a disproof. It will then translate it in natural language and tell it to the user.

Unless mathematics is fundamentally more complicated than chess or go, I don't see why that could not happen.

Regarding carbon sequestration, I think it is worth pointing out that Freeman Dyson, in one of his conferences, mentioned no-till farming as one land management methods that could be used to absorb the carbon emitted in the atmosphere by human activities.

"The point of this calculation is the very favorable rate of exchange between carbon in the atmosphere and carbon in the soil. To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land."

https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...

https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome