Miles Cranmer's Avatar

Miles Cranmer

@milescranmer.bsky.social

AI + Astro/Physics. Assistant Prof at Cambridge. astroautomata.com/

2,822 Followers  |  285 Following  |  109 Posts  |  Joined: 05.09.2023
Posts Following

Posts by Miles Cranmer (@milescranmer.bsky.social)

grep -A/-B might be the worst flags in all of Unix. Is A=after or above? Is B=before or below? Even the alphabetical order is backwards! (A comes *AFTER* B according to grep)

I've given up and just use `grep -A {N} -B {N}` for everything

28.09.2025 18:58 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

Does anybody know the actual page limit for ICLR submissions? The author guidelines page contradicts itself:

24.09.2025 22:43 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 2    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
A History of Mathematics in Cambridge | About the Maths Faculty About the Maths Faculty

Cambridge eventually decided it was a bit much, and, led by the mathematician G.H. Hardy (who, I should note, was Fourth Wrangler in his year...) reformed the system to make it less competitive.

More history:
www.maths.cam.ac.uk/about/history
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-...

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

It was, as you might expect, quite competitive. C.T. Simpson (Second Wrangler, 1842) apparently took a stimulant (ether) to endure 20-hour study sessions. And James Savage studied so hard he was found dead of apoplexy a few months after being named Senior Wrangler in 1859.

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

(Many famous names didn't make the list โ€“ J.J. Thomson famously sent his servant to ask who came second, only to learn it was himself.)

Before 1909 reforms, the examination was a bit of a national spectacle, with substantial betting taking place on the outcome.

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Philippa Fawcett came first in 1890, a full 13% above second place, but since women were not yet awarded degrees until 1948, she was given the title "above the Senior Wrangler." Today, the Maths HPC cluster is named after her.

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
Senior Wrangler - Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a list of all Senior Wranglers going back to 1748 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_...). The list has some recognizable names in science โ€“ Herschel, Stokes, Rayleigh, Eddington, etc., along with some interesting ones, like Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong!

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

When Maths became the first subject to institute written examinations, it kept the name. The top-ranked students are (still) named "Wranglers," and the top scorer overall is named the "Senior Wrangler," then the "Second Wrangler," and so on.

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Historical depiction of an academic disputation

Historical depiction of an academic disputation

Cambridge Maths calls the top student in a given year the "Senior Wrangler."

Why?

Apparently this originates in Medieval examinations called "disputations," where students would literally wrangle (argue) in Latin with designated opponents.

15.09.2025 12:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 7    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

PolymathicAI is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers to join our team at Cambridge, to work on building and understanding large-scale foundation models for science. Please share with potential candidates!

04.09.2025 09:46 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 6    ๐Ÿ” 1    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Cannot wait for someone to wrap SAP Concur in an MCP

Itโ€™s kind of crazy you still canโ€™t generate expense reports from a folder of receipts!

02.08.2025 14:00 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 4    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

These ones are the XREAL One. I quite like them though haven't tried others to compare. These have no 3D, no bluetooth, no battery, you just plug it in your laptop as an external monitor on your face. Works brilliantly for this, its like a hovering external monitor for your laptop

15.07.2025 13:26 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 2    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

That makes sense!

I've had a few people ask for this and am considering it. For now, though, you could implement this constraint manually with the following custom loss function: gist.github.com/MilesCranmer.... Pass it as a string to `loss_function_expression`.

(Let me know if this doesn't work!)

15.07.2025 11:32 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

Really loving AR glasses for working while traveling. No squinting at my laptop + I can still enjoy the view!

These just plug into my closed laptop as an external monitor. Means I'm actually productive on planes now because I'm not hurting my neck looking down the whole flight!

15.07.2025 10:35 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 6    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

By the way, just curious, is that `complexity_of_variables` supposed to be `complexity_of_constants`? I only ask because usually in the pysr forums people are looking to minimize the # of constants rather than # of variables

14.07.2025 18:07 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

This looks pretty good to me! Do try out parallelism=:multiprocessing and let me know if that helps. For whatever reason its better at getting better CPU utilization, though it takes longer to start up every time you launch a new search.

(Likely small, but could try larger `population_size`)

14.07.2025 18:05 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

Tomorrow I get to give my favourite type of lecture to some new physics PhD students ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

14.07.2025 17:58 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 14    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I havenโ€™t done a detailed study myself but it would be cool to see! I can try to ask them what they settled on.

Interesting! Do you remember what hyperparameters were used? It might be there werenโ€™t enough populations to use all cores? (Also you could try parallelism=:multiprocessing)

13.07.2025 21:26 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 2    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

I am a HUGE fan of Mooncake.jl github.com/chalk-lab/Mooncake.jl, a new language-level autodiff for Julia.

Most impressive is how uncompromising the devs are about correctness and reliability. It has some of the best software engineering practices I've seen in the entire ecosystem!

08.07.2025 13:54 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 6    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Wow. Apparently some PySR users are building dedicated rigs for faster equation discovery!

21.05.2025 11:47 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 8    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I just referred to the literal letter 'z' as 'redshift' ๐Ÿ˜ตโ€๐Ÿ’ซ

15.05.2025 13:53 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 4    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

SymbolicRegression.jl v1.10.0 is out! It can now evolve expressions over arbitrary input types.

The video below shows it reverse-engineering a string transformation from examples.

Curious to see how people use this!

02.05.2025 22:43 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 12    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
GitHub - MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl: A borrow checker for Julia A borrow checker for Julia. Contribute to MilesCranmer/BorrowChecker.jl development by creating an account on GitHub.

Just released BorrowChecker.jl โ€” a macro library that brings Rust-style ownership and borrowing to Julia!

github.com/MilesCranmer...

11.04.2025 09:19 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 8    ๐Ÿ” 1    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

You have no idea how long Iโ€™ve waited for this ๐Ÿ˜ฎโ€๐Ÿ’จ

08.04.2025 16:28 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 9    ๐Ÿ” 1    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

We have just opened a fully-funded PhD position at Cambridge, supervised by me & Vasily Belokurov.

Topic: AI + astronomical imaging (broadly defined).
Deadline: April 16.

Please share with anyone who may be interested!

www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/dire...

02.04.2025 11:42 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 16    ๐Ÿ” 4    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

Very excited to share that my group in Cambridge is offering an โ€œAI for Scienceโ€ Encode fellowship on multiscale physics through Pillar VC & ARIA!

Apply by April 30th:
encode.pillar.vc/projects/mul...

25.03.2025 21:08 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 13    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Colab tends to update infrequently, so I would really really recommend adding a compatibility layer.

I think 99% of users who try it out in colab will not be aware of that package constraint, so will end up using old Tidier.jl by mistake

07.03.2025 12:30 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 5    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Post image

This might be the greatest bug report Iโ€™ve ever seen

06.03.2025 18:44 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 28    ๐Ÿ” 4    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1
Post image

Wow, Google Colab just added Julia support!!! ๐ŸŽ‰

05.03.2025 22:27 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 71    ๐Ÿ” 13    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1
Post image Post image Post image

Why 'I donโ€™t know' is the true test for AGIโ€”itโ€™s a strictly harder problem than text generation!

This magnificent 62-page paper (arxiv.org/abs/2408.02357) formally proves AGI hallucinations are inevitable, with 50 pages (!!) of supplementary proofs.

26.02.2025 20:48 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 12    ๐Ÿ” 1    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0