[ExI] Weird new way to do physics

[The Avantguardian]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl>
> To: The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>; ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>; Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2011 10:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Weird new way to do physics
> 
> On Thu, 3 Nov 2011, The Avantguardian wrote:
> 
> [...]
>> this, my computer is running a brute-force search algorithm in Python to 
> 
> Ouch. If you want to stay high-level so much, consider learning a language 
> that has better compiler (I may be not current but last time I checked, 
> Python's compilers didn't impress me too much, which was probably my 
> fault). 

[snip a bunch of suggested scripting languages I have heard of but never used]

How about Free BASIC Ide? In any case Python has some *impressive* strengths like its ability to handle integers as large as you have memory and time to handle. 
 
> 
> AFAIK Python as it is today is unfit for calculations, especially on 
> multicore machines (because it is unicore). Unless you do it in Sage 
> (which relies on libraries in written in C and optimised a lot).

Ahh. That explains no matter how high of a priority I give its thread, it never uses more than 50% my processing power. I have been exploiting this as a feature rather than a bug but hey, whether it's dawn or dusk depends upon ones literal perspective on the world no? 

In any case you are right, it is painfully slow. It is still running and I have thought of half a dozen improvements to make on the code, but it *is* making progress so I am afraid of terminating it to upgrade. Damn my shortsightedness. I should have coded a way to stop the program and save its progress to disk. Sigh. Still the progress is encouraging. It is still a little over a 10% through its search space but its last few local minima have been the scalar in the far right column:  

[3.1666666666666576, -4.1333333333333364, -4.1666666666666696, -3.3333333333333393, -4.9666666666666668] -3.33143361786e-08
[-0.73333333333334094, -4.06666666666667, -2.5666666666666753, 3.4666666666666566, -4.9666666666666668] -2.90099819722e-08
[-4.7666666666666675, -0.90000000000000757, -3.600000000000005, 4.0999999999999881, -4.9666666666666668] 2.29044871958e-08
[1.2999999999999929, -3.7333333333333378, -4.533333333333335, -0.36666666666667436, -4.9000000000000004] 2.1769437808e-08
[-4.2000000000000028, -0.1666666666666744, 1.1333333333333258, -0.66666666666667429, -4.8666666666666671] 1.18882326205e-08
[-4.3000000000000025, 0.23333333333332554, -0.76666666666667427, 0.099999999999992234, -4.4666666666666686] -7.44793737795e-09
[-2.1333333333333435, -2.5333333333333421, -0.10000000000000775, 2.4333333333333269, -4.4000000000000021] -4.2784336074e-09

If the output in the far right column ever reaches zero from either the positive or negative side, then that will indicate the existence of a natural law so unintuitive that its bound to be novel. First natural law discovered by a computer. Heh. Maybe I'll get some credit too. ;-)


>> I will let you all know what my algorithm comes up with. 
> 
> Sure, please do.

Not like I have the cred these days to publish anywhere else. At least it will have time and date stamp and tons of critical review. ;-)

 
Stuart LaForge


“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky