Recently, trying to keep with my weekly post schedule, I’ve been a bit strapped for inspiration. As such, I’ve posted a few times on a major topic from my past life: quantum query complexity. I’ve mostly tried to describe some techniques for (lower) bounding query complexity like the negative adversary method and span programs. But I’ve never really showed how to use these methods to actually set up interesting bounds. Since I am again short…

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Since evolutionary fitness landscapes have been a recurrent theme on TheEGG, I want to return, yet again, to the question of finding local peaks in fitness landscapes. In particular, to the distinction between easy and hard fitness landscapes. Roughly, in easy landscapes, we can find local peaks quickly and in hard ones, we cannot. But this is very vague. To be a little more precise, I have to borrow the notion of orders of growth…

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I read and write a lot of science outside the traditional medium of papers. Most often on blogs, twitter, and Reddit. And these alternative media are colliding more and more with the ‘mainstream media’ of academic publishing. A particularly visible trend has been the twitter paper thread: a collection of tweets that advertise a new paper and summarize its results. I’ve even written such a thread (5-6 March) for my recent paper on how to…

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As I discussed towards the end of an old post on cross-validation and prediction: we don’t always want to have prediction as our primary goal, or metric of success. In fact, I think that if a discipline has not found a vocabulary for its basic terms, a grammar for combining those terms, and a framework for collecting, interpreting, and/or translating experimental practice into those terms then focusing on prediction can actually slow us down or…

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A couple of months ago, I was in Cambridge for the Evolution Evolving conference. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces and meet some new ones. My favourite talk was Karen Kovaka‘s “Fighting about frequency”. It was an extremely well-delivered talk on the philosophy of science. And it engaged with a topic that has been very important to discussions of my own recent work. Although…

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If you want a visual intuition for just how unpredictable chaotic dynamics can be then the go-to toy model is the double pendulum. There are lots of great simulations (and some physical implementations) of the double pendulum online. Recently, /u/abraxasknister posted such a simulation on the /r/physics subreddit and quickly attracted a lot of attention. In their simulation, /u/abraxasknister has a fixed center (block dot) that the first mass (red dot) is attached to (by…

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I feel like TheEGG has been a bit monotone in the sort of theoretical computer science that I’ve been writing about recently. In part, this has been due to time constraints and the pressure of the weekly posting schedule (it has now been over a year with a post every calendar week); and in part due to my mind being too fixated on algorithmic biology. So for this week, I want to change things up…

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