Archive for AI
AI in a storm [cover]
Posted in Books, pictures, University life with tags Académie Goncourt, AI, Anthropic, dangers of AI, deep learning, doomsday argument, francophone literature, Francophonie, French literature, LLMs, mathematical conjecture, Nature, open AI, plagiarism, superintelligence, UN, United Nations General Assembly, weather forecasting, weather prediction on October 6, 2026 by xi'an
Vive les Nations unies ! Merci
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Africa, AI, Azerbaidjan, China, climate change, colonialism, COVID-19, cybersecurity, EU, France, French colonial empire, French government, Gaza, genocide, imperialism, international humanitarian law, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Paris Agreement, Russian invasion, Russian sanctions, social networks, Trump 2.0, Ukraine, UN, United Nations, USA, Victor Orban, war crimes, WHO on October 5, 2026 by xi'an
On his last year of the French Presidency, Emmanuel Macron delivered a marathon speech at the UN General Assembly (which he could attend, contrary to the Palestinian delegation). Here it is, verbatim, and en français. The principles stated therein are commendable and aligned with the fundamentals of a progressive, multilateralist, integral democracy. Unfortunately, the EU and even more France on its own are mostly unable to make progress on the directions highlighted in this discourse… (It does not help that the French government caved in on Russian sanctions a few days earlier to free hostages in Azerbaïdjan. Or that a stress test published the previous day shoes France is poorly protected against reactionary, illiberal drifts à la Trump or à la Orban.)
Depuis ce matin, ici se succèdent les discours qui disent l’état du monde. Et j’ai peur de manquer d’originalité en le décrivant. Chacun décrit en effet le retour de l’impérialisme, de l’arrogance, du retour à la force sans règle ni retenue. Un monde au fond de concentration du pouvoir où quelques-uns pensent qu’on peut battre en brèche l’ordre international pour élargir ses frontières, où d’autres pensent qu’on peut fouler au pied la souveraineté des peuples pour en disposer soi-même, et où quelques-uns pensent pouvoir décider de l’avenir de la planète, qu’il s’agisse du climat ou de l’intelligence artificielle. Au fond, la question qui nous est posée de manière très simple consiste à savoir si nous voulons vivre dans cet état de nature, avec une forme de retour de la loi de la jungle ou dans une société internationale civilisée. Notre devoir, plus que jamais, est de nous tenir droit aux côtés des Nations unies pour décider précisément ensemble de l’intérêt commun, c’est-à-dire du côté de ceux qui veulent choisir librement leur destin, leurs alliances, leurs modèles de développement, leur avenir, du côté de ceux qui refusent que leur souveraineté soit confisquée par la force injuste ou par la peur, et du côté de l’espoir. C’est la raison d’être de notre organisation, cette maison commune qui réunit les peuples libres, égaux, qui est fondée sur l’égalité souveraine de chacun de ses membres. C’est notre charte qui empêche que la puissance des uns leur permette de décider pour les autres. C’est elle surtout qui nous oblige à faire ensemble la démonstration de notre engagement et de notre capacité d’agir utilement.
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Tidy up, Claude!
Posted in Linux, Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AI, Anthropic, BibTeX, Claude, CV, Fuji-Subaru Line 5th Station, github, Happo Lake, infinity pool, jatp, LaTeX, Nagano, pond, publications, Ubuntu 24.04, vita, webpage, Xi'an's Og on September 27, 2026 by xi'an
Nothing out of the ordinary there, but after years of procrastination at failing to update my publication webpage, following a wreckage by the default web composer on Ubuntu (and yours truly obviously!), I took advantage of the extra energy gained by my altitude night at the 5th station to ask Claude to update this page, with it replying it preferred to start from scratch (and from my LaTeX vita files). The only drawback is that many of the links introduced in the earlier version were not retrieved by the AI, despite my repeated request. On the plus side, trawling for missing entries and unpublished arXiv oldies but goldies, as well as adding mountain pictures (from the ‘Og!) proved much easier than the manual-by-keyboard approach. And I got an extra bonus in updating my LaTeX publication file and by creating the corresponding bibTeX file, all now available on my github page.
Nature tidbits
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags AI, Brexit, Britain, Danube, fossils, Genetics, Germany, Horizon Europe, humanities, Isar, Japan, LLMs, Main, MCMC, Nature, Rhein, Roman Empire, whales on August 29, 2026 by xi'an
On the 25 June edition, an editorial calling Europe to lead on free and open science, while boosting industrial consequences. (By the way, Japan just joined Horizon Europe! While the UK will rejoin Erasmus in 2027, under the headline “Brexit tore apart European science — now the research rifts are healing“, mentioning the financial and visa unsolved issues.) A news article continuing the investigation of how AI impacts or will impact mathematical research, with a FirstProof test evaluating AIs solving new, research-level, maths problems. (But missing Claude Mythos and Google’s Aletheia.) A “comment” from a Chinese academic that science needs humanities, at a time when universities in the UK are closing some humanities departments. And a discussion of the exceptional discovery of a whale necropolis, 7km deep, with fossil remains dating back to 5M years mixed with recent ones. Plus another exciting 10 page paper about genetic sleuthing on population changes at the collapse of the Roman empire, in the Danube-Isar and Rhein-Main areas of present-day Germany. (The attached picture representing posterior estimates of life expectancies of some individuals, obtained by MCMC.) In the Carreers section, a story from a geography researcher whose job offer was rescinded at the last moment, a scary thing that is alas not so rare.
Round-robin (with Claude)
Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, Wines with tags AI, Auvergne, écir, bougnat, café, Claude, LLMs, mathematical puzzle, Paris, simulation, Springer Nature, Statistics and Computing, The Fiddler on August 15, 2026 by xi'an
A few days ago I had a coffee in Paris with my long-time friend (and former Statistics & Computing editor) Gilles Celeux, and he mentioned me stopping solving and posting maths puzzles like those weekly published by Le Monde. They have indeed vanished with the retirement of the authors, but Gilles added that the arrival of LLMs would have made the exercise moot. I disagreed as (i) the fun of solving the puzzle on my own has not gone away and (ii) the pedagogical appeal of the puzzle and its resolution remains. As the next Fiddler puzzle arrived in my mailbox, my resolution was put to the test (contrariwise to the previous entry, which did not require massive computations):
The Fiddler League consists of two teams. Over a season, they play each other 162 times. Each team has an equal chance of winning each game, and the results of games are independent. Over the season, on average, how many games would you expect the team with the better record to have won?
I started on the wrong foot with E[X|X≥81] when X is Bin(162,½), equal to 85.77 (either directly or with a Normal approximation), which differs from my second thought, E[max(X,162-X)]=86.07 (either directly or with a Normal approximation), which is larger because of the reflection produced by max. While the first computation was manageable, the second one seemed to involve simulation and I caved in prompting Claude, which provided the answer along with the connection
E[max(X,162−X)]=E[X∣X≥81](1+p81)−81p81
After some expansion, the League boasts 30 teams. Over a season, each team plays each other team five times. (Each team plays a total of 145 games.) Again, each team has an equal chance of winning each game, and the results of games are independent. Over the season, on average, how many games would you expect the team with the best record to have won?
The best record is max(Xi) with each of the 30 Xi‘s a sum of 29 Yij and the Yij=5-Yji distributed as Bin(5,½). The Xi‘s are thus Bin (145,½) but dependent. While I could not figure out a closed form answer for the expectation, a direct Monte Carlo resolution is obviously feasible, with Claude (rather than me) running it over 400 million repetitions, but a 30 dimensional Normal approximation exploiting the correlation of 1/29 between the components leads to roughly 85 as the expected value. (Again computed by a Claudicant simulation.)
While the conclusion that the Normal approximation is pretty accurate with so many terms in the Binomial variates is quite unsurprising, Claude saves me coding time without ruining the puzzle altogether. (And Gemini made me aware that the name of the café where Gilles and I regularly meet, L’Écir, is an Auvergne noun for a local, dangerous, mountain blizzard! Thus linking the place to the foundation of the café by Auvergne expatriates…)
