Lifeboat Foundation

Everyone knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but why do we have arithmetic in the first place, and why is it true? Researchers at the University of Canterbury have recently answered these questions by “reverse engineering” arithmetic from a psychological perspective. To do this, they considered all possible ways that quantities could be combined, and proved (for the first time in mathematical terms) that addition and multiplication are the simplest.

Their proof is based on four assumptions —principles of perceptual organization—that shape how we and other animals experience the world. These assumptions eliminate all possibilities except arithmetic, like how a sculptor’s work reveals a statue hidden in a block of stone.

Monotonicity is the idea of “things changing in the same direction,” and helps us keep track of our place in the world, so that when we approach an object it looms larger but smaller when we move away. Convexity is grounded in intuitions of betweenness. For example, the four corners of a football pitch define the playing field even without boundary lines connecting them. Continuity describes the smoothness with which objects seem to move in space and time. Isomorphism is the idea of sameness or analogy. It’s what allows us to recognize that a cat is more similar to a dog than it is to a rock.

A new type of particle called the strange pentaquark has been found using the Large Hadron Collider. The particle could help researchers catalogue the states of exotic matter and figure out how fundamental particles stick together.

By Leah Crane

While gate model quantum computing holds immense promise for tomorrow, quantum annealing systems are solving complex optimization problems for enterprises today.

Blood clots can be deadly medical emergencies that can form in different parts of your body. Learn the warning signs that you might have one.

Akash Ingale, was admitted to Fortis Hospital, Vashi, diagnosed with the unusual combination of Myasthenia Gravis and Thymoma. Myasthenia Gravis is a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease causing muscle weakness, typically affecting older individuals, making it rare in young patients like Akash. Moreover, the presence of Thymoma in conjunction with Myasthenia Gravis is even rarer, occurring in only 10–12% of cases. For the past eight months, Akash faced significant mobility challenges, severely impacting his quality of life. Managing the conditions required him to be on multiple drug regimens, including steroids and immunosuppressants, further affecting his well-being.

In this video, Dr Prriya Eshpuniyani, Consultant-Thoracic OncoSurgeon Fortis Hospital, Vashi, Navi Mumbai talks about case history, challenges, prognosis.

Originally developed nearly a century ago by physicists studying neutron diffusion, Monte Carlo simulations are mathematical models that use random numbers to simulate different kinds of events. As a simple example of how they work, imagine you have a pair of six-sided dice, and you’d like to determine the probability of the dice landing on any given number.

“You take your dice, and you repeat the same exercise of throwing them on the table, and you look at the outcome,” says Susanna Guatelli, associate professor of physics at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

By repeating the dice-throwing experiment and recording the number of times your dice land on each number, you can build a “probability distribution”—a list giving you the likelihood your dice will land on each possible outcome.

The more competition the better. Download and spread around the world so large companies cant seal away competition under a cloak of AI safety.

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has recently announced that it is open-sourcing its large language model (LLM) called LLaMA 2, making it free for commercial and research use. This move is seen as a direct challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the popular chatbot powered by the GPT-4 model, which is not open-sourced and requires a subscription fee to access.

LLaMA 2 is a generative AI model that can produce natural language texts based on a given input or prompt. It can be used for various applications such as chatbots, content creation, summarization, translation, and more. LLaMA 2 is the second version of Meta’s LLM, which was first released in February 2023. According to Meta, LLaMA 2 was trained on 40% more data than LLaMA 1, which includes information from “publicly available online data sources”. It also claims that it “outperforms” other LLMs like Falcon and MPT when it comes to reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests.

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