Hacker News with Generative AI: Theory

The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis (2019) (arstechnica.com)
But methods are only part of the problem, as Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich argue in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week. It’s not just that individual puzzle pieces are low in quality; it’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture. "Without an overarching theoretical framework,” write Muthukrishna and Henrich, “empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories."

Science, Research, Theory, Psychology

4 points by Tomte 5 days ago | 0 comments

Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf] (di.ens.fr)

Machine Learning, Computer Science, Theory, Research

205 points by Anon84 5 days ago | 25 comments

System Justification Theory (wikipedia.org)
System justification theory is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function.

Social Psychology, Psychology, Theory

4 points by yamrzou 29 days ago | 0 comments

Five Kinds of Nondeterminism (buttondown.com)
No newsletter next week, I'm teaching a TLA+ workshop.

Computer Science, Programming, Theory, Logic, Formal Verification

135 points by BerislavLopac 41 days ago | 32 comments

Overfitting to Theories of Overfitting (argmin.net)
I ended yesterday’s post arguing that we should remove this from machine learning classes.

Machine Learning, Education, Theory

6 points by namanyayg 45 days ago | 0 comments

Theoretical limitations of multi-layer Transformer (arxiv.org)
Transformers, especially the decoder-only variants, are the backbone of most modern large language models; yet we do not have much understanding of their expressive power except for the simple $1$-layer case.

Artificial Intelligence, Theory, Machine Learning

107 points by fovc 61 days ago | 22 comments

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] (cs.wisc.edu)

Programming, Theory, Software Development, Computer Science

211 points by beryilma 88 days ago | 44 comments

Mandelbrot deep zoom theory and practice (2021) (mathr.co.uk)
The complex beauty of the world's most famous fractal, the Mandelbrot set, emerges from the repeated iteration of a simple formula:

Mathematics, Fractals, Theory, Visualizations

183 points by fanf2 89 days ago | 60 comments

In Search of Types (2014) [pdf] (humprog.org)

Programming, Types, Theory, Computer Science, Research

16 points by fanf2 90 days ago | 3 comments

Invariants: Computation and Applications (arxiv.org)
Invariants withstand transformations and, therefore, represent the essence of objects or phenomena.

Mathematics, Computer Science, Theory

47 points by crete 96 days ago | 1 comments

Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness (wikipedia.org)
Global workspace theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s.

Consciousness, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Theory

6 points by yamrzou 112 days ago | 0 comments

Tree Calculus (treecalcul.us)
Tree Calculus captures the essence of computation

Mathematics, Computation, Programming, Theory, Software

493 points by iamwil 113 days ago | 194 comments

Paper Implementation: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (leetarxiv.com)
Add a valid email to register submissions

Mathematics, Communication, Computer Science, Theory

7 points by muragekibicho 113 days ago | 0 comments

Derivative at a Discontinuity (alok.github.io)
The title may seem like a contradiction. How can you differentiate something that’s not even continuous?

Mathematics, Calculus, Theory

134 points by yuppiemephisto 119 days ago | 62 comments

Tiling with Three Polygons Is Undecidable (arxiv.org)
We prove that the following problem is co-RE-complete and thus undecidable: given three simple polygons, is there a tiling of the plane where every tile is an isometry of one of the three polygons (either allowing or forbidding reflections)? This result improves on the best previous construction which requires five polygons.

Mathematics, Computational Geometry, Algorithms, Theory, Undecidability

136 points by denvaar 136 days ago | 27 comments

Turing kicked us out of Heaven (2023) (buttondown.com)
The halting problem is "undecidable": there's no algorithm which can tell you if an arbitrary program with an arbitrary input will halt or not. IE, if you give me a proposed "halt-detector", I can inspect it and come up with a program and input for which it would give the wrong answer.

Computer Science, Algorithms, Theory

34 points by todsacerdoti 147 days ago | 42 comments

Political Fetishism (grognoscente.substack.com)
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.

Politics, Philosophy, Theory, Media

6 points by paulpauper 150 days ago | 0 comments

A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem (sciencedirect.com)
The long-established result of the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is correct, but misleading.

Mathematics, Science, Theory

41 points by gnabgib 153 days ago | 22 comments

Universal optimality of Dijkstra via beyond-worst-case heaps (arxiv.org)
This paper proves that Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm is universally optimal in both its running time and number of comparisons when combined with a sufficiently efficient heap data structure.

Algorithms, Computer Science, Data Structures, Optimization, Theory

203 points by foweltschmerz 159 days ago | 47 comments

An illustrated proof of the CAP theorem (2018) (mwhittaker.github.io)
The CAP theorem states that a distributed system cannot simultaneously be consistent, available, and partition tolerant.

Distributed Systems, Computer Science, Theory, Databases

269 points by tripdout 176 days ago | 83 comments

Comedy Theory (2022) (rpgadventures.io)
In this post I will share with you my theory of how comedy works, and a step-by-step process to creating jokes and comedy sketches.

Comedy, Writing, Theory

255 points by harryf 187 days ago | 175 comments

Fractran (xxiivv.com)
Fractran is a computer architecture based entirely on the multiplication of fractions.

Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, Theory

11 points by todsacerdoti 199 days ago | 1 comments

The Theory of Topos-Theoretic 'Bridges' – A Conceptual Introduction (2016) (glass-bead.org)

Mathematics, Theory, Philosophy

21 points by ebcode 211 days ago | 4 comments

In Theory: Self-Correcting Software (ingig.substack.com)

Software Engineering, Computer Science, Theory

16 points by ingigauti 212 days ago | 4 comments

What does it mean to be a programming language, anyhow? (2021) [pdf] (dl.acm.org)