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All of Peter Jin's Comments + Replies

Peter Jin20

"Rogue celestial body" should also include more commonly encountered interstellar objects, such as Oumuamua. Attempting to detect these objects (and to deflect potential impactors) does not seem obviously futile.

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1Jordan Stone
Thanks Peter. I'll add another category for that like I did with asteroid impacts. 
Cultural accumulation
Peter Jin70

Another manifestation of cultural-artifact co-accumulation is binary bootstrapping, e.g. as used for building compilers. In this case, the correspondence between culture and artifact is rather direct: a culturally impactful idea to introduce an addition or change to a programming language must eventually make its way into the compiler source, which itself needs to be compiled into a new binary artifact via existing binary artifacts of older versions of the compiler or of other programs. As the programming language accumulates new ideas, you require newer b... (read more)

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Measuring hardware overhang
Peter Jin30

Wow, thanks for the very comprehensive response. (Also fun to see someone has compiled a modern chess engine on early-mid-90s hardware and shared their results.)

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Measuring hardware overhang
Peter Jin*Ω262

Thanks for writing this post. I have a handful of quick questions: (a) What was the reference MIPS (or the corresponding CPU) you used for the c. 2019-2020 data point? (b) What was the constant amount of RAM you used to run Stockfish? (c) Do I correctly understand that the Stockfish-to-MIPS comparison is based on the equation [edit: not sure how to best format this LaTeX...]:

So, your post piqued my interest to investigate the Intel 80486 a bit more with the question in mind... (read more)

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7hippke
(a) The most recent data points are from CCRL. They use an i7-4770k and the listed tournament conditions. With this setup, SF11 has about 3500 ELOs. That's what I used as the baseline to calibrate my own machine (an i7-7700k). (b) I used the SF8 default which is 1 GB. (c) Yes. However, the hardware details (RAM, memory bandwidth) are not all that important. You can use these SF9 benchmarks on various CPUs. For example, the AMD Ryzen 1800 is listed with 304,510 MIPS and gets 14,377,000 nodes/sec on Stockfish (i.e., 19.9 nodes per MIPS). The oldest CPU in the list, the Pentium-150 has 282 MIPS and reaches 5,626 nodes/sec (i.e., 47.2 nodes per MIPS). That's about a factor of two difference, due to memory and related advantages. As we're getting that much every 18 months due to Moore's law, it's a small (but relevant) detail, and decreases the hardware overhang slightly. Thanks for bringing that up! Giving Stockfish more memory also helps, but not a lot. Also, you can't give 128 GB of RAM to a 486 CPU. The 1 GB is probably already stretching it. Another small detail which reduces the overhang by likely less than one year. There are a few more subtle details like endgame databases. Back then, these were small, constrained by disk space limitations. Today, we have 7-stone endgame databases through the cloud (they weigh in at 140 TB). That seems to be worth about 50 ELO.
What are the most important papers/post/resources to read to understand more of GPT-3?
Answer by Peter JinΩ6130

nostalgebraist's blog is a must-read regarding GPT-x, including GPT-3. Perhaps, start here ("the transformer... 'explained'?"), which helps to contextualize GPT-x within the history of machine learning.

(Though, I should note that nostalgebraist holds a contrarian "bearish" position on GPT-3 in particular; for the "bullish" case instead, read Gwern.)

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3adamShimi
Thanks for the answer! I knew about the "transformer explained" post, but I was not aware of its author's position on GPT-3.
Erving Goffman’s ‘paper’
Answer by Peter Jin*140

There's a reference in the footnotes of Schelling p. 116 to a paper by Goffman, "On Face-Work" (Psychiatry 18:224, 1955). The same article was republished in Goffman's book Interaction Ritual (1967).

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What problem would you like to see Reinforcement Learning applied to?
Peter Jin60

You might be interested to learn about some recently announced work on training agents with reinforcement learning to play "no-press" Diplomacy:

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Why anything that can be for-profit, should be
Peter Jin10

Thanks, that's a clarifying distinction.

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Why anything that can be for-profit, should be
Peter Jin10

Agree that specifics are important here. Some specifically interesting examples to me where non-profit and for-profit models overlap:

  • A university is set up as a non-profit org, receiving charitable donations from alums and other institutions or individuals. The university's main non-profit activities are education and research. The university also wholly owns a for-profit org (basically, a hedge fund) which is used to manage the university's endowment. edit: actually, an endowment fund also counts as regulatory non-profit if its sole purpose is to fund a
... (read more)
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1jasoncrawford
Technically nonprofit doesn't mean you can't make a profit. It just means you can't distribute that profit, the way a for-profit pays dividends. You have to use any profit for operations. I was mostly analyzing nonprofits that don't charge for services. In the case of a nonprofit that charges, and does not rely on external donations, then the “product loop” is much more intact. In that case it's only the investor loop, the “return loop” that is still problematic.
Why anything that can be for-profit, should be
Peter Jin20

One other important feedback "loop," or rather a feedback terminal, is an M&A event. The for-profit organization's owners receive a single injection of $ from a new parent organization, and then the for-profit organization (a) continues operating as a separate subsidiary of the parent, or (b) ceases its separate existence, getting liquidated into the parent. (Various outcomes in between can also occur.)

I'm curious whether there is an analog of this sort of M&A "loop" with non-profit organizations. If there is no such analog, then we have two broken

... (read more)
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2jasoncrawford
This is an interesting point. I'm not sure if this is really another loop, or just part of the “return loop” for investors. M&A is one way that investors realize a return.
What are some fun ways to spend $100,000?
Peter Jin20

One might even find it doubly fun to give a random internet forum participant $100,000.

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