Conferences; research updates

[dmm]

This week, Nov 17-18, Thu-Fri, 8am-11:45am Boston time, "Quantum physics and the first-person perspective": www.essentiafoundation.org/quantum-physics-and-the-first-person-perspective/seeing/

JuliaCon 2023, juliacon.org/2023/ the call for proposals is posted, deadline Dec 18: pretalx.com/juliacon2023/cfp


I've spent more quality time focusing of two breakthroughs in understanding the nature and the behavior of machine learning models which came from the "penumbra" of "prosaic alignment" start-ups and which I wrote about in my previous two posts.

"Grokking is (more or less) solved." I took brief notes between Oct 21 and Oct 23: github.com/anhinga/2022-notes/tree/main/Grokking-is-solved

"Generative autoregressive models are similators." I took extensive notes between Oct 5 and Oct 23: github.com/anhinga/2022-notes/tree/main/Generative-autoregressive-models-are-similators

I am continuing to develop thoughts related to these topics, I am going to gradually write more about those topics in the comments.

Comments

[dmm]

That particular group seems to do research linked with rather interesting math:

http://www.physics.umb.edu/Research/QBism/readings.html

http://www.physics.umb.edu/Research/QBism/solutions.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIC-POVM - symmetric, informationally complete, positive operator-valued measure

This is one of papers from that group: "The SIC Question: History and State of Play", https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07901

The Wikipedia page says:

"A symmetric, informationally complete, positive operator-valued measure (SIC-POVM) is a special case of a generalized measurement on a Hilbert space, used in the field of quantum mechanics. A measurement of the prescribed form satisfies certain defining qualities that makes it an interesting candidate for a "standard quantum measurement", utilized in the study of foundational quantum mechanics, most notably in QBism. Furthermore, it has been shown that applications exist in quantum state tomography and quantum cryptography, and a possible connection has been discovered with Hilbert's twelfth problem."

In particular: "SICs and Algebraic Number Theory", https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.05200

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_twelfth_problem

[dmm]

The first speaker: https://www.jaypienaar.com/

His old blog: https://pienaarspace.wordpress.com/2013-2/

Some papers:

"Unobservable entities in QBism and phenomenology", https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.14302

"QBism and Relational Quantum Mechanics compared", https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13977