emSKI?

It is done, I work on polishing, rewriting, porting, etc. It is the dreamed combination of chemSKI and em.

I remain available for other implementations, counseling, chemistry I/O, new ideas. old projects I was not aware of, alternatives.

Nulkukel applied to something

UPDATE: see the nulkukel and the SKIworm at the updated chemSKI with tokens page.

John Tromp‘ nulkukel is the minimal SK expression for the Y combinator:

S S K (S (K (S S (S(S S K)))) K)

In the official chemSKI, we may try then Y I, which is

((((S S) K) ((S (K ((S S) (S ((S S) K))))) K)) I)

(which you input in the textarea “λSKI> mol”). Everything works as expected.

But then nulkukel applied to something, ie Y x, is:

((((S S) K) ((S (K ((S S) (S ((S S) K))))) K)) x)

Input this and after a while the reduction will stop for no apparent reason.

There is a bug in the official chemSKI.

Now is solved, but it is not yet shared.

With the bug solved, the nulkukel applied to something works and produces a gun of pairs application and S (as a fanout), just like it should.

Although very very slowly, ie by using lots of reductions.

A far more shorter, only two nodes chemSKI graph, does the same, namely

A input y x^S x output y

just like in chemlambda, mentioned many times, for example the chemlambda collection #259.

Will say more about the Y combinator in chemSKI, and about recursion, later.

New

This is just to tell that things happen and that I’m open to new things to happen as well.

New things are brewing, even if I give hints to recent things I’m interested in, like: Gaussian graph rewrite systems, commutative numbers, matematica foris. Somehow all these will appear in the future, in some form. Some of the old things will give new fruits as well.

But essentially I’m going towards doing something really new. Last 12 years are enough.

But like, what about older or even older works, abandon them? No!

Is this thrill about research work. I suppose could spend a couple of years to explain old stuff. I become also interested in students, colleagues, human interaction for the sake of it. Yeah but also come on! how much is just monkey authority where you don’t want to understand?

So what? I don’t know. Let’s be open about this, OK?

Or take a holiday spirit 🙂 Oooh how interesting…

Answer from ANR concerning the ANR Bigben project

For context see Problems with the ANR Bigben project.

The presidency of the french Agence Nationale de la Recherche kindly answered to my demand of reexamination of the awarded ANR Bigben project. [added: … after several previous interesting mail exchanges with higher and higher ANR representatives; one argument impressed me a lot, perhaps it deserves a full discussion because after all we want Open Science to win.]

Here are the two parts of the answer: avis (pdf) and letter (pdf).

Here is my reply to ANR answer (links added and [text added between brackets here]):

Thank you for the precise response and for the time spent by ANR concerning this subject. For the scientific part there is an article in preparation.

Here are some short remarks.

1. There are no “generalized bipotentials”. The name is invented by the project leader to fit with his competences. The source of the theoretical foundation which gives the name to the project is arXiv:1902.04598, [On the information content of the difference from hamiltonian evolution] where in proposition 1.3 is explained the appearance of what the project leader now calls “generalized bipotentials”. This is not referenced in the project.
2. For the experts: a bipotential is always relative to the duality chosen. What matters is the difference between the bipotential and the duality. Change the duality and you obtain a change of bipotential, by a substraction of the old duality and an addition of the new duality. Is this a theoretical advance towards “generalized bipotentials”?
3. The subject of my hamiltonian inclusions is old (2008) [Hamiltonian inclusions with convex dissipation]. It was turned into “symplectic BEN” during a collaboration with the project leader, where the connection with Brezis-Ekeland and Nayroles principles was made, by neglecting the inertial terms. But the reduction of hamiltonian inclusions, or SBEN if you like, to BEN is misleading. Back in 2014, when Djimedo Kondo, member of the bigben team, was introduced to the subject, [slides of d’Alembert seminary from 2014], [figshare], he immediately remarked that the reduction of SBEN to BEN has problems. Indeed, what the leader de Saxce claims is that all reduces to the minimization of a cost functional over all evolution curves. But the cost, as easily remarked by Kondo, is infinite for most of the trajectories, unless one already satisfies the dynamic equations. By neglecting the inertial terms, one does not solve the problem, because the same kind of infinities force to consider the satisfiability of the trajectory (as in contact or some plasticity or damage problems). Even since 2014 it was clear that the “SBEN is BEN” idea of de Saxce, cannot work in practice, except for some trivial examples. In this project the leader de Saxce wants to pursue the same. I claim that other ideas are needed (some of them I have, but am I willing to make the public again, without attribution?).
4. I am of course willing to see my work being developed and moreover enhanced by meaningful collaboration. It does not seem the case until now. There is also the ethical aspect which I refrained to mention because the scientific case is almost enough. That is why I refused the “visio” meetings recently, because previous ones, where I protested against “SBEN is BEN” or where I was assured about the details of collaboration, amounted to nothing. I am now accused, in messages leaked by inadvertence by de Saxce, to have strange financial demands, when in reality I asked for a schedule and details just like the other members of the project. This is a lack of collegiality which I take very seriously.
5. Therefore, I take as very positive the interest into hamiltonian inclusion, or SBEN, or by any other name. It is also positive that some work on arXiv (not any work, only the useful one) is appropriated, thus recognizing the value.
6. I take as negative the lack of attribution. I challenged my career on these Open Science ideas, do I need to see my work being used without proper attribution? But I admit though that from the point of view of ANR, or any other management organization, it would be risky to accept as valuable any arXiv, say, “preprint” (and probably it would mean the death of arXiv itself, due to low quality submissions). But in this case, clearly this work is valuable.

With best regards to all the members of this discussion,

Marius Buliga

_____

After the response, a final comment: it would be nice if the reputed ANR takes a step towards acknowledging more Open Science, just like more than 100 years ago the french society accepted impressionism in art.

The history of that art movement is an inspiration since a long time, see Boring mathematics, artistes pompiers and impressionists.

Happy and working

working,working, working with pen and paper, very refreshing, very happy….

Do you know who’s happier than a mathematician working with pen and paper? A mathematician working in front of a big blackboard, with a good provision of chalk 🙂

After so much time in front of screens, I thought I lost this pen and paper pleasure. But no!

There is internet as well and I’m reasonably chatty and easy to find. Very important channel, I learn a lot lately.

Good work and return to the normal

This is just to tell that I’m good, working on new as well as old stuff. The pandemic time wears off. It is not a good time for open science, nor for the net, but who knows? Later, maybe? I’m optimistic though, is time for that kind of new which looks classic when you look at it.

Then we, or they will speak, those who can still read, focus, think, study, those who have passion, who have talent. Peace.

False examination problem (evaluare nationala 2022, matematica)

At the national exam (evaluare nationala) in Romania, 2022, the examiners asked the kids to solve a geometry problem which is false.

Indeed, the problem 4b), part III, is false. The hypothesis (the examiners use in the exam correction) is not complete in order to achieve the conclusion.

Let me explain with simple words what you have. It is about plane geometry. Look at the figure from the left:

There is a fan of four segments AB = 4cm, AC = 8 cm, AD = 10 cm, AE = 20 cm.

The angle CAD is equal to 30 degrees. The angles BAC and DAE are equal, but otherwise unspecified.

That’s all the hypothesis, as written in the exam.

The conclusion is that CE = 2 BD.

This conclusion is false, let’s see why.

With the figure from the left we have

angle BAD = angle BAC + angle CAD

angle CAE = angle DAE + angle CAD

so because BAC and DAE are equal angles, we deduce

angle BAD = angle CAE

The kid has to remark that the lenghts are chosen such that

AB/AC = AD/AE = 1/2

which makes the triangles BAD and CAE proportional, which implies the conclusion

BD/CE = AB/AC = 1/2

The error in the solution is that the hypothesis of the problem is strictly weaker than the figure provided. Indeed, nowhere in the text is written that, say in inverse trigonometric order, we see AB, AC, AD, AE.

Look at the figure from the right now. It is compatible with the hypothesis, but the conclusion is false.

Now we have the relations

angle BAD = angle BAC – angle CAD

angle CAE = angle DAE + angle CAD

and from this we deduce

angle BAD != angle CAE

therefore the triangles BAD and CAE are NOT proportional. The 1/2 proportionality does not transfer to BD/CE.

___________

The examiners argument is that they provided a figure. But the figure is strictly more significant than the hypothesis of the problem.

We learn that geometry is the art of reasoning correctly on wrong figures. We learn that the figure in geometry is just an indication, that is because there are an infinity of possible figures for the same geometry problem, and the conclusion is still true in the infinity of particular drawings because of the proof.

Many kids made attempts to use that AB perpendicular on BD and AC perpendicular on CE because the figure, as it is, suggest that, if you squint…

Clearly the examiners did not think enough about this problem. The remedy was simple, to add the AB, AC, AD, AE order, but, it seems they did not consider this as a possibility.

Such a basic lack of competence would be unheard of if we were 20-30 years ago.

Now people discuss on the net if the figure well leads or misleads the kids, there are other mistakes in the exam problems. What is funny is that there is a lot discussion about plane geometry which involves opinions about everything, like education, politics, etc

Listen, this is plane geometry, where the proof tells us if something is true or false. We can discuss as much as we like, but in the frame of plane geometry, once we have a proof, there is nothing to discuss which could turn the proof in another direction.

This problem is false.

Not misleading, correct or incorrect, not a matter of opinion. Is false.

Godement relation is SHUFFLE

From Pursuing Stacks by Alexander Grothendieck, extended and revised version by Mateo Carmona with the collaboration of Ulrik Buchholtz, page 4:

Godement relation is just an instance of SHUFFLE. See this for the algebraic context and this for the computational context.

It seems that this is the root cause of the commutativity behind the most “general” formalisms (the quotes signify a false statement). There should be truly general formalisms where the SHUFFLE deviation is quantified and controlled, much like in differential geometry curvature is just the control of the deviation from LIN. Who is willing to hunt for the myriad of reasoning which use SHUFFLE somewhere in the background, though?

ChorOS: further down the stack

It turns out that Pure See is not the bottom of the stack. There is an even lower level formalism, which I wish to call it ChorOS, in the honor of “choros” aka space.

Let’s make it into an acronym:

CHemically ORiented Operating System

The name is not important, but what it does it is.

For example it covers now projective geometry, which turns out to be a commutative phenomenon. Another illusion, shattered.

So I’ll bookmark today as the official day for the birth of ChorOS.

You know what’s also funny? That it fits into the hypotheses of small graph rewrite systems.

It is left to see it in action, how?

Another one

Here’s another datapoint about chemlambda visibility, I’d like to understand why.

https://www.reveddit.com/y/chemlambda/?all=true&removal_status=all

and archived link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220214232833/https://www.reveddit.com/y/chemlambda/?all=true&removal_status=all

Added to the anti-chemlambda tag.

Misleading content algorithm is snake oil

Per HN Google bans distribution of misleading content. They claim that they have an algorithm of classification of misleading content.

This is not an opinion. Detection of misleading content by an algorithm is equivalent to an algorithm for the halting problem. For it is misleading to claim that a Turing Machine with a given input does not halt when it does. If Google algorithm exists, then it should detect in particular such misleading statements. We know that there is no such algorithm, therefore Google lies.

Somehow this is not surprising. Google never respected science or mathematics, even if they work hard to give the misleading image that they do. Gve me one example that they did, proportionally to their economical scale. They are very easy to be defeated by single persons and when they spend money for research usually is wasteful compared with personal initiatives which are not financially supported. I am thinking about the comparison between Google Scholar and Sci-Hub, as an example. UPDATE: just these days see, as another example Odd release in conjunction with RoseTTAFold gaining traction. [archived version].

There is no new, to my knowledge, scientific result where Google is involved, which was not studied by an academic or an open colaboration before.

They can only scale, they are not capable to invent. They can supervise, they can’t create. They collect information created by others. They want to “organize”. They were favored at the beginning when it was a good idea (for a supervising frame of mind) to scan the whole web. They were always advanteged by the mother state. They attract nerds but they have to buy creative people.

It’s clear what they are. That they lie to such a degree, so to say that they have an agorithm for the halting problem, is a classical ridiculous aspect of capitalism. You know, like capitalists sell BS for money and communists make gulags.

Once, such merchands of lies were selling snake oil which can cure any disease.

At some point such practices were considered ilegal. I don’t have expectations that they will be legally sanctioned. I don’t think that they are really so important. Presently they are a factor of inhibition of science (not the only one) and historically they are already not viable. Nor them, nor communist variants of surveillance state. But you know, the time scale of history has decades as units.

Writings repository at Github

Further experimenting, I created a writings repository. You find there, as .md files (some with pictures), some of my writings. Follow the repository for more, in the future. Also as reference.

Alternatively, I experiment with the chorasimilarity channel of long reads, on telegram-telegraph, which you can access without a telegram channel (and of course with a telegram account they look nicer on your phone).

Asemantic is search of chora, not nihilism

Many people think that my rejection of semantics is a kind of nihilism. On the contrary, see my views that asemantic computing is the right frame for distributed computing! When I say that global semantics is the enemy of reality, it is because:

• reality is a discussion, or a thing
• and semantics always wants to substitute reality, the thing, with evidence, the object.

Therefore global semantics is the enemy of the discussion, is canned reality, is less than reality.

As discussion needs a place to happen, the asemantic point of view is a necessary part in the search of place, of chora.

As this search is not ideologically driven, mathematics comes to rescue. To try mathematical models for various aspects of this search, to accept mathematical consequences of mathematical hypotheses is the contrary of ideology.

Part of the search for chora is the passage from term rewrite systems, from logos, to graph rewrite systems, to khumeia. As argued in the asemantic computing draft, there are clear, mathematical not ideological reasons for the liberation from semantics. But to substitute it with something more, outside of logos.

This something more exists since the most ancient times. One of my sources of amazements is the cultural importance of space for aboriginals, see Garak, the universe by Gulumbu Yunupingu.

Besides Plato’ chora, you find traces in hermeticism, buddhism, everywhere. That is why, perhaps, the original chemlambda simulations (and their comments) have such a strange halucinatory influence.

Because I can’t tell you “is like this”, I can only tell “your ideology is not enough” and then show examples almost devoid of the constraints of the logos.

So there is a world, real, outside semantics and I think that we can explore this world in a scientific way.

Indexed but excluded

Just learned that google indexed but excluded, without any explanation, without any recourse, about a 1/3 of the posts on this blog. This means, as I noticed, that google does not show these pages in the search results.

There is no technical reason, because one can find among the censored pages new and old ones.

That is why you can use the internal search window, once you already here. Many pages among those excluded are about google, or about open access and open science, or about molecular computers.

There are also menus with posts by months.

There is also the recent telegram channel which you can see without telegram, or with telegram, which is rather nice on phones.

I don’t endorse any of the means I use to communicate. It is your choice, it would be nice though if there were means for the ones who want to progress to be able to do so free from corporate horror.

Chorasimilarity 10 years anniversary

I missed that: chorasimilarity (name and) blog had the 10 years anniversary on Jan 2nd: link to first post.

UPDATE: and this is the 801 post. There are more than 800 posts written, but I tend to trash the personal posts after a while. What remains appears to be read many years after the writing date. May be happening because there is value in these posts, or by time circularity phenomenon, which says that because of strong intuition, I start to explain something from the conclusion (far in the future) to the beginning (in the near past). As the future of a past post is in the past of a future post, you get time circularity.

As concerns the advancement and sometimes curious time circularities, read the recent Logic in the infinitesimal place.

What about 2020 projects?

This is the 2nd year when I updated predictive posts for the activity in the year to come, the last one is from dec. 2018, updated today.

[this place left blank, to be filled at the right time]

Dabble in pure see and anharmonic lambda as a solution for the emergent algebras problem, rigorously, for 2020.

UPDATE (dec. 2020): Many things done, more to come. Pure see in particular.

Quine graphs (3), ouroboros, hapax and going public

UPDATE: all available at chemlambda.github.io

Several news:

• I hope you’ll enjoy the description of the ouroboros and it’s lambda calculus explanations, as well as the differences between chemlambda and lambda calculus, propagators, etc.
• Or the updated quines in Interaction combinators and in chemlambda page
• You may want to watch the repository quinegraphs for further developments, in time and in space
• As well the reorganised repository hapax, for the same reasons.

I decided that progressively I’m going to go public, with a combination of arXiv, Github and Zenodo (or Figshare), and publication. But there is a lot of stuff I have to publish and that is why this will happen progressively. Which means it will be nice to watch because it is interesting, for me at least,  to answer to the question:

What the … does a researcher when publishing? What is this for? Why?

Seriously, the questions are not at all directed against classical publication, nor are they biased versus OA. When you publish serially, like a researcher, you often tell again and again a story which evolves in time. To make a comparison, it is like a sequence of frames in a movie.

Only that it is not as simple. It is not quite like a sequence of frames,  is like a sequence of pictures, each one with it’s repeating tags, again and again.

Not at all compressed. And not at all like an evolving repository of programs which get better with time.

What is a chemlambda quine?

UPDATE 4: See Interaction combinators and Chemlambda quines.

UPDATE 3: I made a landing page for my pages to play and learn.

UPDATE 2: And now there is Fractalize!

UPDATE: The most recent addition to the material mentioned in the post is Find a Quine, which let you generate random 10 nodes graphs (there are 9 billion of them) and to search for new quines. They are rare, but today I found 3 (two all of them are shown as examples).  If you find one, mail me the code (instructions on the page).

__

The ease of use of the recently written chemlambda.js makes easier the sharing of past ideas (from the chemlambda collection) and as well of new ideas.

Here is some material and some new thoughts. Before this, just recall that the *new* work is in hapax. See what chemlambda has to do with hapax, especially towards the end.

A video tutorial about how to use the rest of new demos.

The story of the first chemlambda quine, deduced from the predecessor of a Church number. Especially funny is that this time you are not watching an animation, it happens in front of you 🙂

More quines and random eggs, if you want to go further in the subject of chemlambda quines.  The eggs are 4-nodes graphs (there are 720 of them). They manifest an amazing variety of behaviour. I think that the most interesting is that there are quines and there are also graphs which have a reversible evolution, without being quines. Indeed, in chemlambda a quine is one which has a periodic evolution (thus is reversible) under the greedy algorithm of rewrites. But there is also the reversible, but not quine case, where you can reverse the evolution of a graph by picking a sequence of rewrites.

Finally, if you want to look also at famous animations, you have the feed the quine. This contains some quines but also some other graphs which featured in the chemlambda collection.

Most of all, come back to see more, because I’m going to update and update…

Blockchain categoricitis 2, or life as an investor and a category theory fan

… or the unreasonable effectiveness of category theory in blockchain investments.

A year ago I wrote the post Blockchain categoricitis and now I see my prediction happening.

Categoricitis is the name of a disease which infects the predisposed fans of category theory, those which are not armed with powerfull mathematical antibodies. Show them some diagrams from the height of your academic tower, tell them you have answers for real problems and they will believe.

Case in point: RChain. See Boom, bust and blockchain: RChain Cooperative’s cryptocurrency dreams dissolve into controversy.

Update: Epilogue? (28.02.2020)

Yes, just another cryptocurrency story… Wait a moment, this one is different, because it is backed by strong mathematical authority! You’ll practically see all the actors from the GeekWire story mentioned in the posts linked further.

Look:

Guestpost at John Baez blog: RChain (archived)

“Programmers, venture capitalists, blockchain enthusiasts, experts in software, finance, and mathematics: myriad perspectives from around the globe came to join in the dawn of a new internet. Let’s just say, it’s a lot to take in. This project is the real deal – the idea is revolutionary […]”

RChain is light years ahead of the industry. Why? It is upholding the principle of correct by construction with the depth and rigor of mathematics.”

__________

Another one, in the same place: Pyrofex (archived). This is not a bombastic guestpost, it’s authored by Baez.

“Mike Stay is applying category theory to computation at a new startup called Pyrofex. And this startup has now entered a deal with RChain.”

Incidentally (but which fan reads everything?) in the same post Baez is candid about computation and category theory.

“When I first started, I thought the basic story would be obvious: people must be making up categories where the morphisms describe processes of computation.

But I soon learned I was wrong: […] the morphisms were equivalence classes of things going between data types—and this equivalence relation completely washed out the difference, between, say, a program that actually computes 237 × 419 and a program that just prints out 99303, which happens to be the answer to that problem.

In other words, the actual process of computation was not visible in the category-theoretic framework.” [boldfaced by me]

(then he goes on to say that 2-categories are needed in fact, etc.)

In Applied Category Theory at NIST (archived) we read:

“The workshop aims to bring together two distinct groups. First, category theorists interested in pursuing applications outside of the usual mathematical fields. Second, domain experts and research managers from industry, government, science and engineering who have in mind potential domain applications for categorical methods.”

and we see an animation from the post  “Correct-by-construction Casper | A Visualization for the Future of Blockchain Consensus“.

________________________

I never trusted these ideas. I had interactions with some of the actors in this story   (example) (another example), basically around distributed GLC . Between 2013-2015, instead of writing programs the fans of GLC  practically killed the distributed   GLC project  because it was all the time presented in misleading terms of agents and processes, despite my dislike. Which made me write chemlambda, so eventually that was good.

[hype] GLC and chemlambda are sort of ideal Lisp machines which you can cut in half and they still work. But you have to renounce at semantics for that, which makes this description very different from the actual Lisp machines.  [/hype]

 

 

Category theory is not a theory, here’s why: [updated]

Category theory does not make predictions.

This is a black and white formulation, so there certainly are exceptions. Feel free to contradict.

___________________________________________

UPDATE: As I’m watching Gromov on probability, symmetry, linearity, the first part:

I can’t stop noticing several things:

• he repeatedly say “we don’t compute”, “we don’t make computations”
• he rightly say that the classical mathematical notation hides the real thing behind, like for example by using numbers, sets, enumerations (of states for ex.)
• and he clearly thinks that category theory is a more evolved language than the classical.

Yes, my opinion is that indeed the category theory language is more evolved than classical. But there is an even more evolved stage: computation theory made geometrical (or more symmetric, without the need for states, enumerations, etc).

Category theory is some kind of trap for those mathematicians who want to say something  is computable or something is, or should be an algorithm, but they don’t know how to say it correctly. Corectly means without the burden of external, unnatural bagagge, like enumeration, naming, evaluations, etc. So they resort to category theory language, because it allows them to abstract over sets, enumerations, etc.

There is no, yet, a fully geometrical version of computation theory.

What Gromov wants is to express himself in that ideal computation theory, but instead he only has category theory language to use.

Gromov computes and then he says this is not a computation.

Grothendieck, when he soaks the nut in the water, he lets the water compute. He just build a computer and let it run.  He reports the results, that’s what classical mathematical language permits.

That’s the problem with category theory, it does not compute, properly, just reports the results of it.

___________________________________________

As concerns the real way humans use category theory…

Mathematicians use category theory as a tool, or as a notation, or as a thought discipline, or as an explanation style. Definitely useful for the informed researcher! Or a life purpose for a few minds.

All hype for the fans of mathematics, computer science or other sciences. To them, category theory gives the false impression of understanding. Deep inside, the fan of science (who does not want/have time/understands anything of the subject) feels that all creative insights are based on a small repertoire of simple (apparently) tricks. Something that the fan can do, something which looks science-y, without the effort.

Then, there are the programmers, wonderful clever people who practice a new science and long for recognition from the classics 🙂 Category theory seems modular enough for them. A tool for abstraction, too, something they are trained in.  And — why don’t you recognize? — with that eternal polish of mathematics, but without the effort.

This is exploited cynically by good  public communicators with a creativity problem.  The recipe is: explain. Take an older, difficult creation, wash it with category theory and present it as new.