Michael Levin has talked about interesting dynamics with the bubble sort algorithm, which is only a few lines of code, that have parallels in biological processes, suggesting there is a more nuanced logic to nature that we are not seeing
I mean, I don’t see why that is special? Correct me if I’m wrong. I like his research and views on biological electric spaces, but this I did not understand.
When F has a special structure (say, low-order polynomial), we can actually find the exact solutions. More general structure (e.g. convexity, differentiability) doesn't give us the exact solution, but it lets use use clever numerical algorithms to find them. There are techniques we can use when F has little to no structure, known as "black box" methods, and they work particularly well when we have few variables. In the case of "fuzzy graphs", there are only two variables, so this software takes the approach of computing F(x, y) for every pixel on the screen. In general this doesn't work due to the curse of dimensionality, but it creates good visualizations in low dimensions :)
To answer your question directly, yes we can use differential geometry to speed up optimization. As an example, you've probably heard of gradient descent. Preconditioned gradient descent leverages the geometry of the surface to speed up convergence. In the language of differential geometry, if we're optimizing f(x), then x is "contravariant" but grad(f) is "covariant", so technically we can't just add grad(f) to x since they have different types. We first have to multiply grad(f) by a rank-2 tensor (the "preconditioner") that encodes the local curvature of f around x. This technique is used by the Adam optimizer, with the assumption that the preconditioner is diagonal.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120208174423/https://maa.org/p...
I can do the VR part - any chance you can share the algo, so I can get the machine to lift it? I can imagine a 3d graphing tool would need spatialisation in order to be properly appreciated.
https://c3d.libretexts.org/CalcPlot3D/index.htmlT
This viewer also has a "2d" mode that produces a colored 2D plot.
But I am curious if these plots can/have been empirically validated with real world data.
The dark areas in the plot seem to be the features driving the shape of the plots. That means that these would be the areas the plotter should be most sure about, otherwise the plot would have a different shape.
I might be missing an interpretation that makes much more sense, but I think “error” might be the wrong terminology to use here. It doesn’t just mean “difference between A and B”, it includes some idea of being a measure of wrongness.
IAmBroom•1h ago
I'm impressed.