DSD

After more than 3/4 of a mil­lion guesses, in over 50,000 games played in 67 coun­tries, the results are clear: Sci­ence sounds like gobbledygook.

arXiv vs. snarXiv has been live for 6 months now, and it’s time to take a look at the results. Here’s how the game works. The user sees two titles: one is the title of an actual the­o­ret­i­cal high energy physics paper on the arXiv, and the other is a com­pletely fake title ran­domly gen­er­ated by the snarXiv. The user guesses which one is real, finds out if they’re right or wrong, and then starts over with a new pair of titles.

I’ve been record­ing the result of each guess, orig­i­nally just out of curios­ity. I never expected to get rea­son­able sta­tis­tics on the over 120,000 high energy the­ory papers on the arXiv. But after more than 750,000 guesses, that’s exactly what I’ve got, which means we can do some fun stuff. Con­tinue reading…

lie is a python mod­ule for com­pu­ta­tions with Lie groups, Lie alge­bras, rep­re­sen­ta­tions, root sys­tems, and more.

I based it on the com­puter alge­bra pack­age LiE, writ­ten by M. A. A. van Leeuwen, A. M. Cohen and B. Lisser in the early 90’s. They chose to imple­ment a pro­pri­etary script­ing lan­guage as a wrap­per for all the fancy math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms. While this lan­guage is use­ful for inter­ac­tive com­pu­ta­tions and short scripts, python is more expres­sive and pow­er­ful — def­i­nitely what you want when explor­ing your favorite excep­tional group.

A Fun Example

Here’s an exam­ple of using lie to do a cal­cu­la­tion that’s near and dear to every high energy theorist’s heart. We’ll show how the 10 + 5bar + 1 rep­re­sen­ta­tion of SU(5) con­tains a sin­gle stan­dard model gen­er­a­tion. First we’ll fire up python and import the lie mod­ule. Con­tinue reading…

The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less random.

Actu­ally, the snarXiv only gen­er­ates tan­ta­liz­ing titles and abstracts at the moment, while the arXiv deliv­ers match­ing papers as well. Details of the imple­men­ta­tion are below. I’m the author, and I don’t remem­ber exactly why I decided to do this. I did already have the frame­work lying around from a pre­vi­ous project, and I swear I spent more time doing research last week­end than imple­ment­ing snarXiv.org.

Sug­gested Uses for the snarXiv

• If you’re a grad­u­ate stu­dent, gloomily read through the abstracts, think­ing to your­self that you don’t under­stand papers on the real arXiv any better.
• If you’re a post-doc, reload until you find some­thing to work on.
• If you’re a pro­fes­sor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the lit­tle hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the mu prob­lem, and the con­fine­ment prob­lem. Then expe­ri­ence pro­found disappointment.
• If you’re a famous physi­cist, keep reload­ing until you see your name on some­thing, then claim credit for it. Con­tinue reading…

I should prob­a­bly doc­u­ment the real ori­gin of the The­o­rem of the Day and Phi­los­o­phy of the Day. Cof­fee and Henry David Thoreau are per­haps less involved than orig­i­nally indicated.

The the­o­rem gen­er­a­tor was writ­ten by a good friend of mine, Matt Gline, as a project for CS51: Abstrac­tion and Design in Com­puter Pro­gram­ming, which we took together as freshmen.

The assign­ment was to use LISP to imple­ment a con­text free gram­mar — basi­cally a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs. The sub­ject was what­ever we wanted. Good ones from past years include computer-generated mys­tery novel­las, course-guide reports, and per­for­mance art direc­tions. Every year there’s a con­test, and Matt’s the­o­rem gen­er­a­tor was hys­ter­i­cal enough to win him lunch at the fac­ulty club. Con­tinue reading…

New Phi­los­o­phy

Con­tinue reading…