Linguist, philosopher, computer scientist, foodie, wine geek etc. I follow some people I disagree with. Don’t interpret my likes please.
London
Joined February 2011
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This paper has been a long time cooking, but it's out now in TACL, with Nathanaël Fijalkow. Pretty much the first nontrivial (consistent) algorithm for learning Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars:
doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00323
1/5
In his defence, the British public often falls for this sort of bullshit .
Healey vows cheaper marmalade and gherkins in pre-Budget package of 'everyday fixes' bbc.in/4zTnQ4K
Alexander Clark retweeted
Please do not submit LLM-written papers to TACL! I appreciate many people (even high-school students) have success doing this with ARR, Neurips, and other mega-conf. But TACL reviewing is still almost all done by people, and LLM/AI slop is very unlikely to be accepted.
Alexander Clark retweeted
Justin Moore on OpenAI’s proof of nonamenability of F justintatchmoore.github.io/h…
Alexander Clark retweeted
Something that gets lost in housing discourse is the difference between IRL vs online NIMBYs
IRL NIMBYS tend to be old people who hate poors, traffic, & change.
Online NIMBYs are usually leftists with weird beefs. They think YIMBYs are annoying and supply/demand isn't real.
Alexander Clark retweeted
Now that's a real speedup! Already 1% faster than the standard O(n log n) alg with n as small as 10^600000.
We’re publishing another update to OpenAI Problem #130: computing the exact discrete Fourier transform below n log n.
Our paper now incorporates the all-length bound:
T(n) = O(n(log n)^(1−δ)), with δ = 0.0007547360.
That’s 10.34 times the exponent saving of δ = 7.3×10⁻⁵ in our previous announcement.
The stronger Fourier result comes from Jacob Sussman’s five-stage framework and Chafik Boukhalfa’s improved construction, building on @OpenAI, @0xdoug, @RohanArun, @SJ_Swapnil_Jain and the wider community.
Alexander Clark retweeted
My dream had always been to prove beautiful theorems as the AI agents unloaded my dishwasher. Well, it went the wrong way... 😂
My hot take on current AI CS/Maths results, eg 3sum, is that they indicate that classical asymptotic worst case complexity is fundamentally flawed.
Alexander Clark retweeted
Guy who thinks the Singularity Is Near but it's really important we fix housing policy before then
Alexander Clark retweeted
I'm currently returning to Toronto from a summit on the future of mathematics, at OpenAI. @SebastienBubeck asked me to talk a bit about the future we'd all like to avoid, where humans are mathematically disempowered. @Jacob_Tsimerman advised us to try to prioritize detail over correctness, and I have no doubt that I succeeded in deprioritizing correctness.
I tried to find a title that wasn't too bombastic:
This is well worth a read :
What should we make of recent language model advancements in mathematics? In my new post, I reflect on long-standing cognitive debates about symbols and neural networks in light of this progress. (Link below)
ALT https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/symbols-neural-networks-and-mathematical Symbols, neural networks, and mathematical intelligence Some reflections on connectionism and the basis of higher-level cognition A simple watercolor showing a robot reclining while imagining an affine variety (i.e., the manifold of points implicitly defined by a set of polynomials) and saying “f(x,y,z) = ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z)” — courtesy of Gemini
Alexander Clark retweeted
In this interview, Verkerk and Gray answer some of my questions about their amazing 2026 paper, in which they show that many of the Greenbergian universals are robustly supported by the Grambank data. Thanks to Russell and Annemarie! dlc.hypotheses.org/4383
Alexander Clark retweeted
Burnham will get his chance, but I must confess to my eye the UK looks basically unfixable. The voters simply do not want the policies that could get things on the right track.
Right wing twitter is all aghast about Buckinghamshire taxis for SEN, but it's all just an error (100x!!!) in the data. Old on the left, correct on the right. But nobody cares.
The government’s public database has the original mistake; the data will have been taken from there.
contractsfinder.service.gov.…
Alexander Clark retweeted
NEW: a report from Vanderbilt and WashU just dropped, taking on the "state of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences," a big topic among critics of higher ed.
Read along w/ me 🧵
I like this graph but I am disappointed that they cut off the y-axis at 0. They should have had the conviction to consider what happens when it becomes negative. Well done though for not putting the current cost (3k/kg) on there though.
New post: Will we really put data centers in space?
Read it here: forethought.org/research/wil…
Alexander Clark retweeted
The regulatory environment in Britain appears to be based on the assumption that economic growth matched or outstripped the cost of the new burdens. Therefore the desired benefits of regulation could happen without any real downside.
As we have entered our zero growth phase this seems to be dangerously wrong and entire previously functioning areas of economic activity aren’t just struggling anymore but instead disappearing entirely.
Apparently this was Soho at 1am; so it’s kind of like complaining that you got offered a cup of coffee in Starbucks.
In the space of literally two minutes walking through central London just now, was offered (by separate people) drugs, sex and brothels, accosted by some weirdo trying to get me into his “free taxi” and had someone else try to rob me. Never a police officer in sight, of course. I love London but criminals are being given free reign.