AI

• “ReBeL: Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning and Search for Imperfect-Information Games”, Brown et al 2020 (heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker close to solved with a generalizable AlphaZero-like approach?)

• “Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess”, Tomašev et al 2020

• “A digital biomarker of diabetes from smartphone-based vascular signals”, Avram et al 2020 (time-series of blood pulses can diagnose diabetes? weird, but not as weird as predicting gender from retinas)

• “Tasks, stability, architecture, and compute: Training more effective learned optimizers, and using them to train themselves”, Metz et al 2020; “Gradient Descent: The Ultimate Optimizer”, Chandra et al 2019 (deeper—we need to go deeper… now scales to VGG-Net)

• “X-LXMERT/X-UNITER: Paint, Caption and Answer Questions with Multi-Modal Transformers”, Cho et al 2020 (online demo; finally, some new work on text → image)

• “StyleGAN network blending”, Justin Pinkney/“Resolution Dependent GAN Interpolation for Controllable Image Synthesis Between Domains”, Pinkney & Adler2020 (interpolating between models to transfer images between domains, eg. FFHQ ↔︎ foxes ↔︎ anime ↔︎ MLP ↔︎ furries)

• “Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches”, Ethan Rosenthal (bin packing banana slices)

Matters Of Scale:

• “DeepSpeed: Extreme-scale model training for everyone” (demonstrates training of GPT-3-180b & 1t-parameter models (“The trillion-parameter model has 298 layers of Transformers with a hidden dimension of 17,408 and is trained with sequence length 2,048 and batch size 2,048”), w/open-source code; able to use CPU+GPU RAM simultaneously for 13b-parameter models on each node per Pudipeddi et al 2020; sparse attention for saving RAM; approximated Adam gradients for saving bandwidth)

• “GPT-f: Generative Language Modeling for Automated Theorem Proving”, Polu & Sutskever2020b (GPT-2 for Metamath scales & can bootstrap its theorem-proving ability—onward to IMO!)

• “Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding”, Hendrycks et al 2020 (introducing new much harder benchmarks to stress-test models—nevertheless, bigger=better: GPT-3 model size vs Q&A, with GPT-3-173b hitting almost 50% out of 4-choice questions vs baseline models like T5 at the random baseline of only 25%)

• “DynamicEmbedding: Extending TensorFlow for Colossal-Scale Applications”, Zeng et al 2020 (embeddings-as-a-service Google-wide; tool AIs want to be agent AIs…)

• “A Time Leap Challenge for SAT Solving”, Fichte et al 2020 (your computer is faster than you think, software+hardware overhang: ~2.5× performance increase in SAT solving since 2000, about equally due to software & hardware gains, although slightly more software—new software on old hardware beats old on new. See previously Grace2013.)

• “Efficient Transformers: A Survey”, Tay et al 2020 (more on efficient attention approaches)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “A general dimension of genetic sharing across diverse cognitive traits inferred from molecular data”, de la Fuente et al 2020

• “Mapping genomic loci prioritises genes and implicates synaptic biology in schizophrenia”, PGC et al 2020 (PGC SCZ3: 248 genome-wide hits; 7.7% PGS; OR = 44 comparing top vs bottom percentile risk); “Exome sequencing identifies rare coding variants in 10 genes which confer substantial risk for schizophrenia”, Singh et al 2020 (figure 6a is a striking demonstration of negative/purifying selection: more harmful mutations are rarer)

• “Genome-wide association study of over 40,000 bipolar disorder cases provides novel biological insights”, Mullins et al 2020 (PGC3 BPD; PGS: 4.75%)

• “Genetic Fortune: Winning or Losing Education, Income, and Health”, Kweon et al 2020 (within-family education/income/health PGSes)

• “GWAS of Over 427,000 Individuals Establishes GABAergic and Synaptic Molecular Pathways as Key for Cognitive Executive Functions”, Hatoum et al 2020

• “Shared heritability of face and brain shape distinct from cognitive traits”, Naqvi et al 2020 (setting limits to facial prediction of some phenotypes)

Recent Evolution:

• “Rapid Evolution of Plastic-degrading Enzymes Prevalent in the Global Ocean”, Alam et al 2020

Engineering:

• The first successful cloning of the endangered Przewalski’s horse

• “Human Embryo Gene Editing Gets a Road Map—Not a Green Light” (National Academy of Science’s Heritable Human Genome Editing 2020 report)

• “CRISPR-engineered human brown-like adipocytes prevent diet-induced obesity and ameliorate metabolic syndrome in mice”, Wang et al 2020; “CRISPR-enhanced human adipocyte ‘browning’ as cell therapy for metabolic disease”, Tsagkaraki et al 2020

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Blueberry Earth”, Sandberg 2018

Politics/Religion

• “America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction”, Fukuyama 2014 (see also: constitutional hardball/“The Empty Chamber”)

• “‘Dwarf Pride’ Was Hard Won. Will a Growth Drug Undermine It? An experimental medication that increases height in children with the most common form of dwarfism has raised hope that it can help them lead easier lives. But some say the condition is not a problem in need of a cure.”, FDA-approved (Savarirayan et al 2020; amusing trivia: the reason why crossing any dog breed with Corgis gives you a Corgified version of that dog breed is because Corgis are homozygous dominant on an FGF4 mutation causing similar achondroplasia as in humans)

• “Laws of Xmas”, Akiva & Ilene Miller1998

• Gruinard Island

• London Necropolis railway station

Psychology/Biology

• “Self-Supervised Natural Image Reconstruction and Rich Semantic Classification from Brain Activity”, Gaziv et al 2020 (towards brain imitation learning)

• “Catching Cowpox: The Early Spread of Smallpox Vaccination, 1798–1810”, Rusnock2009

• “Creativity and Intelligence: An Investigation of the Threshold Hypothesis”, Weiss et al 2020

• Discovery of more water on Mars and first extra-galactic planet

• The Collyer Brothers; The Yuba County Five

Technology

• “Unraveling The JPEG”, Omar Shehata2019 (explorable: editing JPEGs to understand their encoding)

• “The Recursive Universe”, Amanda Ghassaei (how to implement Conway’s Game of Life inside itself as a single giant ‘metapixel’ pattern)

• “The First Roman Fonts”, John Boardley

• Naumachia

Economics

• “Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued”, patio11

• “A Deep Dive into K-pop”, Matt Lakeman

• “Wikipedia Matters”, Hinnosaar et al 2019 (randomization of edits to foreign languages’ Wikipedia entries about an obscure Spanish city increases tourism to the city from those foreign countries by 9%)

Miscellaneous

• 1955 Le Mans disaster (the past is a Third World country)