[HN Gopher] Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Me...
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Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method - LANL
(2023)
Author : ioblomov
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-01-01 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lanl.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lanl.gov)
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| Used widely in a nuclear engineering reactor simulator that was
| essentially a quadruple integral finite-element analysis program
| based on MC.
| palsecam wrote:
| > _While playing solitaire to while away the time during rest,
| Ulam asked himself a straightforward question: what are the
| chances that a hand laid out with 52 cards will come out
| successfully? It is a deceptively challenging problem--there are
| around 8 x 10^67 ways to sort a deck of cards (a number
| approaching the estimated number of atoms in the observable
| universe)._ He wondered if instead of applying pure combinatorial
| calculations, which would be monstrously difficult, he could
| simply lay out the cards one hundred times and count the number
| of successful plays. _Implicit was the assumption that each play
| started with randomized conditions._
|
| Indeed, the best "results", to this day, are still approximations
| based on brute-forcing a huge number of deals (aka, using Monte-
| Carlo.)
|
| _"The probability of being able to win a game of Klondike
| [Solitaire] with best-possible play is not known, and the_
| inability of theoreticians to precisely calculate these odds _has
| been referred to by mathematician Persi Diaconis as "one of the
| embarrassments of applied probability"" _--
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...
|
| _"Here we show that a single general purpose Artificial
| Intelligence program, called "Solvitaire", can be used to
| determine the winnability percentage of 45 different single-
| player card games with a 95% confidence interval of +- 0.1% or
| better. For example, we report the winnability of Klondike as
| 81.956% +- 0.096%"_ -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.12314v3 (2019)
|
| More on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42372083
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I'm currently going through the Statistical Rethinking [0] class
| on Bayesian statistics, and it reminded me that Bayesian
| statistics' renaissance was basically thanks to Monte Carlo
| methods. Such methods can approximate posterior distributions
| that are often extremely difficult to calculate analytically.
|
| [0] https://github.com/rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2023
| szvsw wrote:
| I think we are on the cusp of another renaissance in Bayesian /
| MC methods - specifically, I think in some relatively short
| timespan (5 yrs? 10 yrs?), it's reasonable to think that some
| new algorithms that are massively parallel at their core will
| break through. Whether it's on the VI side or MCMC side or
| BO/GP side something totally new I don't know, but it just
| feels like it is bound to happen eventually.
|
| Big +1 for that textbook!
|
| Also giving a +1 to the Bayesian Optimization/Gaussian
| Processes textbook [1] that came out last year - I mean 2 years
| ago - beautiful graphics and full PDF officially hosted.
|
| [1] Garnett 2023,
| https://bayesoptbook.com/book/bayesoptbook.pdf
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| You seem to know quite a bit about Bayesian statistics;
| anywhere recommendations of reading material specifically
| about Bayesian inference applied on time series?
| szvsw wrote:
| I always completely forget that the metropolis-hastings algorithm
| is named after someone whose last name is actually Metropolis.
|
| It never ceases to amaze me what an environment Los Alamos was
| for producing so much foundational research.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| All/most of the US National labs are still incredibly
| productive at making big discoveries. I attribute it largely to
| the culture and organization system Ernest Lawrence set up
| during the Manhattan Project, which persists to this day- and
| of course generous funding.
| szvsw wrote:
| Absolutely! I've gotten to work on some projects with folks
| from the labs - pretty much meaningless projects in the grand
| scheme of research going on there, but still feel proud to
| have done it and lucky to have worked with them.
| TomMasz wrote:
| They had some of the brightest minds in the world, thanks in
| part to the Nazi's rejection of "Jewish science".
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > They had some of the brightest minds in the world, thanks
| in part to the Nazi's rejection of "Jewish science".
|
| Indeed.
|
| https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-
| manhatt...
|
| However, the US didn't accept "Nazi science" when they
| accepted actual Nazis, because there's no such thing as Nazi
| science, any more than there is Jewish science; there is just
| science performed by individuals and groups, who may share a
| heritage, country, or culture, or may not.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
|
| Furthermore, it's unclear but some Nazis or Nazi sympathizers
| may have been leaking nuclear secrets from Los Alamos to
| Germany:
|
| https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the-
| nazi...
|
| Speaking of Jews involved in the project, Ethel Rosenberg's
| brother was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project,
| and she and her husband were already working on behalf of the
| USSR as early as 1942.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg
|
| > Rosenberg had been introduced to Semyonov by Bernard
| Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA
| and NKVD liaison for Earl Browder. After Semyonov was
| recalled to Moscow in 1944 his duties were taken over by
| Feklisov.
|
| > Feklisov learned through Rosenberg that Ethel's brother
| David was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the
| Los Alamos National Laboratory; he directed Julius to recruit
| Greenglass.
|
| > In February 1944, Rosenberg succeeded in recruiting a
| second source of Manhattan Project information, engineer
| Russell McNutt, who worked on designs for the plants at Oak
| Ridge National Laboratory. For this success Rosenberg
| received a $100 bonus. McNutt's employment provided access to
| secrets about processes for manufacturing weapons-grade
| uranium.
|
| All of this is not to say that being Jewish or Gentile is a
| sign of scientific rigor or moral uprightness or lack
| thereof, but rather to say that "misery acquaints a man with
| strange bed-fellows," and that Nazis and Jews were both
| miserable, but in entirely different senses of the word, and
| that misery led to both astonishing atrocities and roses
| growing from concrete.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/strange_bedfellows
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| "He would not even agree to being classified as a mathematician."
| That's a weird thing to write about someone who wrote an
| autobiography called "Adventures of a Mathematician".
| macshome wrote:
| Are most of the images on that page missing or is it just me?
| palsecam wrote:
| They are missing (for me too). Unfortunately, they are also
| missing on the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/web/*/
| https://www.lanl.gov/media/pub...) :-(
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Try searching for the captions. I think you can find all/most
| of them.
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