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I do not believe that an actin-based system for parallel computation could ever be more energy efficient than ceramic hardware.

It might give off less waste heat than your standard desktop PC; but that is not a valid comparison when you consider other, specialized types of circuitry.

Furthermore, the energetic cost of producing and purifying protein should be noted as expensive in the calculation of efficiency;

And the fact that actin filaments are not permanently stable in solution makes this system untenable.


Here is the Nature paper:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16454


I just learned about Math 55 and would trade plenty to teach that course.

The problem here is that Mochizuki uses too many German Nazi references.

Those people had no academic integrity whatsoever; and their works are exclusively stolen, through war crimes and the Holocaust.

After you do the right thing, and translate Mochizuki's nomenclature into French and Slavic; the proof is no longer valid, and the problem is negligible.

For the record, Oswald Teichmüller is a fraudulent Nazi war criminal who robbed Felix Hausdorff during the Holocaust.

The undeniable fact that Oswald Teichmüller is solely published in a journal of racial propaganda makes Mochizuki's choice of terminology questionable at the very least.

The fact that I am being suppressed for this demonstrates unambiguously that Mochizuki's proof is nothing more than media hype and puffery.


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750422 and marked it off-topic.


I can agree with this being extremely problematic in a political sense - it's horribly wrong to rip someone off, even more so by robbing them during wartime. Quoting such stolen material is a kind of passive support and should not be tolerated.

BUT - how does that affect it from a purely scientific perspective? Is the quoted stolen material also incorrect? Because it would be equally bad, IMHO, to ignore an important and correct scientific finding just because it was produced in an unacceptable way.

If I exaggerate a bit, it's similar to someone experimenting on babies to discover a cure for AIDS - sure, they're a terrible person and should not receive praise/compensation for their discovery, their actions should be condemned. But should we also throw away the discovered cure?


Interesting how Teichmueller has a bunch of stuff named after him, yet there's very little information about him to be had. There are some references on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22o+teichmueller%22&btn.... He is certainly published in more than a single journal, however.

However there are no references to him on his "discoveries". Note the lack of a history section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teichm%C3%BCller_space and compare that to the section on Hilbert space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space#History

On the other hand, Felix Hausdorff, who also appears to have worked in the same field (though topology is probably a far broader field than I can understand) has plenty of information readily available. This is conjecture, but the mere lack of solid information on Teichmueller could lend credence to some of what you say.

There is a book about mathematics under the Nazis, which would likely cover a lot of ground http://www.jstor.org/stable/20453494?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

Anyway, bit of a mystery ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Sounds to me like you are putting a political-correctness test or lens on what should be a mathematical and science based issue.

Shame on you for bringing subjective issues into an objective issue.


I dont understand what you mean. Can you clarify?


When you translate "Bad Luck" or 'Unlucky" into Confucian-era Chinese, the term is respectively equivocal to poverty or impoverished. "Random mutation" is vaguely technical enough to have the same connotation in the public lexicon. The term does not have specific meaning in molecular biology, so it might as well be superstition.

The risk factors are there because we do not do enough to care for each other as individuals in society. The statistics are the tool used for trading liabilities in the applied oncological epidemiology colloquially referred to as health insurance risk modeling.


Cite?

It's not "Confucian-era Chinese", but google translate gives : 倒霉 which per wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉) I don't see anything relating to poverty or impoverishment.


I read the headline and wondered:

"Since when is 'Bad Luck' anything other than a euphemism for the physiological stress which is symptomatic of poverty?"

Clever science journalists note that nearly everything outside of the organism can be generically labeled as the environment.

__As a reply to DanBC:__

>normal random mutation

This phrase does not mean anything in terms of molecular biology or genetics. It is equivalent to "Bad Luck", or "mutation triggered by something". The phrase is inappropriate because it equates point mutations, insertion mutations and deletion mutations.

As a rule, when thou wants to say the modifier "normal random"; thou should instead say "normally distributed", and then make sure that is worth mentioning in that field of science.


In this specific case: "bad luck" was being used to talk about normal random mutation, as opposed to a genetic predisposition or a mutation triggered by something you ate or drank or smoked or otherwse exposed yourself.

It's unfortunate that the original researchers used that phrase; and the the reporters did a terrible job of explaining it; and that the reporting of this newer study uses similar language.


[deleted]


The appeal to ego is an important part of clickbait. Sociological approaches are the most effective measure in societies where the incidence of cancer is low. Ironically, people who find out that cancer is their personal problem are those who are most able to receive treatment. Many if not all modern problems must be solved through massive collaboration; that which we can be conditioned to eschew or enjoy. The negative conditioning is thusly a Bayesian impedance to human advancement.


I want to specify that and say there is no known quantum device which can successfully break lattice-based cryptosystems.

Even if there was such a machine, the number of people who could write code for it is less than or equal to ten.


The best way to articulate that criticism is to quote me (or at least paraphrase Daniel Lidar) and say:

"We have quantum information processing, but no computers as of yet."

And, that which we already have is so-darned-expensive; that it is less useful than classical computation unless you are building some exotic kind of sensor.


The efficiency of application to long algorithms and large datasets is a function of available computing power. Certain problems in coding theory can be reduced to homomorphic calculation, but it takes petabytes of data to represent the solution space.

I would recommend Moore's Law as an approximate formula which is useful for guessing what year you will be able to run programs at home on your personal computer. These days, conservative estimates for the number of transistors on a chip should double every 2 years.


That was true in an age where single threaded performance also saw similiar improvements. But those days a gone. The power wall and transister scaling also ate factors here.

Today, increases in compute capabilities enabling new technology requires new architectures that match the problems. Similarly to how GPUs enabled deep learning.


Can you elaborate on those coding problem reducible to homomorphic calculations? I'm very interested. I thought I heard the converse, homomorphic calculations using coding (my rough understanding of Learning With Errors).


How well do you understand the term "homomorphism"?

Search engines are the most common example, in general.


Just to be clear, you're referring to coding theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory) in the sense of geometric codes from information theory, right? I fail to see an obvious way search engines fit in.


"We would like to explain how; but the proof is too long to be tweeted within the 144 character limit!"


I have gone: spelunking in the deepest caves; and climbing on the tallest mountains; but my breadcrumbs always lead home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XybNecZc1nU


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