YouSaid · the spoken record
Po-Shen Loh
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- 2021-05-14
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- 2021-05-14
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“Not the principle. Our principle isn't based on that at all. We just want to let you know if something is coming close so that you can protect yourself.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So, what I'm saying is that let's just say free market capitalism was not based on altruism. I think it's based on You make a system of incentives so that everybody trying to maximize their own situation somehow contributes to the whole, that's a game theoretic solution to a very hard problem. And so this is actually basically mechanism design. We've basically come up with a different mechanism, different set of incentives, which incentivizes the adoption. Because actually whenever we've been rolling it out, usually the first question we ask people, like say in a university, is, do you know what Novid does? And most of them have read about the other apps and they say, oh, Novid will tell you after you've been around someone so you can quarantine. And we have to explain to them, actually, Novid never wants to ask you to quarantine.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, first of all, I want to say I always have respect for the methods that other people use. And so it's good to see that other people have been trying. But what we have noticed is that the difference between our value proposition to the user and the value proposition to the user delivered by everything that was made before is that unfortunately the action of installing a standard contact tracing app Will then tell you after you have already been exposed to the disease so that you can protect other people from you? And what that does to your own direct probability of getting sick, if you think about it, suppose you were making the decision, should I or should I not install one of those apps? What does that do to your own probability of getting sick? Close to zero.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually makes a lot of sense, and I also think that since we're when you think of disease spreading, it spreads in aggregate in the sense that if there are some people who maybe are more risk tolerant because of other things in their life, well, there might also be other people who are less risk tolerance. And then those people decide to isolate. But what matters is in the aggregate that this are not of the infection spreading drops below. And so the key is if you can empower people with that power to make that decision, you might actually still be able to drive that R not down below one.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we have a perpetual thing where you just always need a new vaccine every year, it could actually be beneficial to make sure we have as many other techniques as possible for parts of the world that can't afford, for example, that kind of distribution.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's because I'm talking about endgame now. Endgame means you have very few cases, but everywhere we're always thinking once there's a few cases, then does that mean we now open up? You open up in the past, then the cases go up again until you have to lock down again. And now, when we talk about the dynamic process that makes, it's guaranteeing you always have cases until you have the great vaccines, which is we both got vaccinated. This is good. But at the same time, why I'm thinking this is still important is because we know that many vaccine makers have said they're preparing for the next dose, next year.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are trying to answer that question right now? So the answer is we don't know yet, but that's actually why we're very happy that now the idea has started to become more widely known and we're already starting to collaborate with epidemiologists. Again, I'm a just a mathematician, right? And a mathematician should not be the person who is telling everybody this will definitely work. But because of the potential power of this approach, especially the potential power of this being an endgame for COVID. Have gotten the interest of real researchers, and we're now working together to try to actually understand the answer to that question. Because you see, there's a theory. So what I can share is the mathematics of here's why there's some hope that this would work”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, we also saw in those examples, especially looking at the screenshots people gave, that hit as soon as the typical person has two or three other direct connections on the system, because that means that our app has reached a virality or not of two to three. The key is we were making a viral app to fight the virus spreading on the same network that the virus spreads out.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, we do expose also to everyone an interesting chart that says here's how many people you have. Here's how many at distance two, meaning via people. And then here's how many at distance three. And the reason we do that is that actually ends up being a dynamic that also boosts adoption, drives another feedback loop. The reason is because we saw actually when we deployed this in some universities that when people see on their app that they are indirectly connected to hundreds or thousands of other people, they get excited and they tell other people, hey, let's download this app.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do expose to each person how many direct connections they have But for privacy purposes, we don't tell anybody who their connections, like how their connections are interconnected.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the way we dealt with that is we actually expect that the typical network is very sparse. The technical term sparse would mean that the average degree or the average number of connections that a person has is going to be at most like. Hundred strong connections that you care about. If we think of it almost in terms of the heavy hitters, actually in most people's lives, if we just kept track of their top 100 interactions, that's probably most of the signal.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's actually why this computer algorithm competition stuff was handy. It's because there are only about seven to eight giga people in the world. Not that many. So if you can make your algorithms linear time or almost linear time, A computer operates in gigahertz. Only need to do one run, one recalculation every hour in terms of telling people how far away these dangers are. So I suddenly have 3,600 seconds, and my CPU cores are running in gigahertz. And at most, they're 8 giga people.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we were able to bring people in to build server infrastructure in C actually so that we could support significant numbers of people without needing tons of servers.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so the key was that you had to do a significant amount of work on the actual mobile app development, which fortunately the team that we brought was this kind of general thinkers where we would dig in deep into the operating system documentation and the API libraries. So we got that working. But there's another angle, which is you also need the servers to be able to compute fast enough. Is tying back to this old school computer programming competitions and Math Olympiads. In fact, our team that was working on the algorithm and backend side included several people who had been in these competitions from before. Which I happen to know because I do coach the team for the math.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we wanted to make sure we didn't eat up the battery. So that one we can, we actually are very proud of the fact that ours uses very little battery. Actually, even if compared to Apple's own system”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to call them permissions. I just want to say that's not what you usually do with Bluetooth. Usually with Bluetooth, you say, Do I have headphones nearby? Okay, I'm done. You don't go and say, Do I have headphones nearby or do I have another phone nearby which is doing something? And then keep asking that same question. Keep asking the question. It's actually not easy. And I mean, there were some parts of it which actually a lot of people had tried unsuccessfully. Actually, it's known that, for example, the UK was trying to do something similar. And the problem they ran into was when you program things on iOS, iOS is very good at making it hard to do things in the background. So, there was quite a lot of effort required to go and make this thing work.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to answer that question in terms of building the product, but then I'm also going to acknowledge that just having an app doesn't make it useful. That's actually maybe the easy part, if you know what I mean. There's all of this stuff about rollout adoption and awareness. But let's focus on the app part first. So that's, again, why I said the team is incredible. So we have a bunch of people who let's just say that the technology that we use to make it is not the standard way you make an app. If you think about a standard iOS app or Android app, those are user interface that contacts a web server and sends some information back and forth. We're doing some stuff that has to hook into the operating system of saying, let's go use Bluetooth for something. It wasn't really meant for, right? So there's that part.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ours is about predicting the future. We change from, I mean, the standard paradigm was what already happened quick damage control. Ours is predict the future. If you run into that person once in the grocery store today and never see them again, it's irrelevant for predicting the future. And therefore, for ours, what really matters is the many hours around the other person, at which point if you're scanning every five to eight minutes.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, we actually do estimate the duration, but the way we estimate the duration is like how a movie is filmed in the sense that every so often, every few minutes, we check what's nearby. It's like how a movie is filmed. You take lots of snapshots. So there's no way in a battery efficient way to really keep track of that proximity. However, fortunately, we're using probability. The fact is the paradigm that we're using is it's not super important if you run into that person only for 10 minutes at the grocery store. If that's a stranger that you run into 10 minutes in this grocery store, that's not going to be relevant for our paradigm because our paradigm is not telling you who were you around before and might therefore have gotten infected by already.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not using the Pythagorean theorem basically. I mean, if I just knew the GPS coordinates, we could use the Pythagorean theorem too. Sorry, that's just how I call it. Distance formula, whatever you want to call it”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go and find out how far they can detect nearby things by Bluetooth, and then they can find out that these two phones were approximately such and such distance apart. And that kind of relative proximity information is enough to construct this big network.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It and the point of what we do, I guess, in mathematics is we try to explore the search space to go and find out as many possibilities as there are. And in this case, in this case, it's an applied search space. That's why the inputs from design, user experience design, and actual people are important. But you asked about, I guess, the mathematical or the technical things underpinning it. So I think the first thing I'll say is we wanted to make this thing not require your personal information. And so in order to do that, what gave me the confidence to, I guess, lead our team to run at the beginning is we saw that this could be done without using GPS information. So technically, what's going on is if two smartphones, it's a smartphone app, if two smartphones have this thing installed, they just communicate with each other by Bluetooth.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. First, I'm going to reply to something you said about the freedom inside this because actually that was the idea. The idea is this is game theory, right? And effectively what we did is analogous to free market economy as opposed to central planning. If you just line up the set of incentives correctly so that people have in their purely selfish behavior are contributing to the optimization of the global function.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found out that there's two ways to separate set A from set B. You can also let the people at set B at the fringe of set A attempt to remove themselves from this interface. It's the symmetry of A and B separation. Everyone was looking at A. We look at B. And suddenly B is in their incentive to do so.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And just going on on that, actually just talking more about what that could do and why we were so excited about it, it's that not only would people want to install it, Would they do if you start to see that this disease is getting closer and closer? We surveyed informally people, but they said, as we saw it getting closer, we would hide. We would try to not have contacts. But now you notice what this has just achieved. The whole goal on this whole exercise was you got the people who might be sick and you got everyone else set A and set B. Set A is the people who might be sick, set B is everyone else. And for the entirety of the past contact tracing approaches, you tried to get set A to do things that might not be to their liking or their will because that's removing them from society.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And actually, that point you just made, I don't take credit for that observation. There was another person I talked to who pointed out that it's very interesting that this feedback loop is even more effective when the disease is worse. And that's actually not a bad characteristic to have in your feedback loop if you're trying to help civilization keep running.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of people. In fact, I don't want to say almost everyone. That's a very strong statement, but a very large number of people”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's pleasant. So the question is suppose that such a disease broke. Who would want to install an app that would tell them how many relationships away from them this disease had struck?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple idea. What if we told everyone that? It turns out that actually unlocks some interesting behavioral feedback loops, which, for example, let me now jump to a non-COVID example to show why this maybe could be useful. Actually, we think it could be quite useful. Imagine there was Ebola or some hemorrhagic fever. Imagine it spread through contact, through the air, in fact, pretend. That's a disastrous disease. It has a high fatality rate. And as you die, you're bleeding out of every orifice.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then, how would you do this? The only problem is that you don't know who's sick because, especially with this disease, if I see somebody who looks perfectly healthy, the disease spreads two days before you have any symptoms. And so it's actually not possible. That's where the network theory comes in. You caught it from someone. What if we change the paradigm and we said whenever there's a sickness, tell everybody how many physical relationships separate them from the sickness? That is the trivial idea we added. The trivial idea was the distance between you and a disease is not measured in feet or seconds. It's measured in terms of how many close physical relationships separate you, like these six degrees of separation like LinkedIn.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I knew we needed when we started was to bring user experience at the core. Okay, but so The idea was suppose there was a hypothetically there was a pandemic. What would you want? You would want a way to be able to live your life as much as possible and avoid getting sick. Can we make an app to help you avoid getting sick? Notice how I've just articulated the problem. It is not can we make an app so that after you are around somebody who's sick you can be removed from society. It's can we make an app so that you can avoid getting sick? That would run a positive feed. I don't know if I want to call it positive or negative, but it would run a good feedback loop.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's the problem against their will part gives you the wrong kind of a feedback loop which makes it hard to control the disease because then the people you're trying to control keep getting other people sick. You can see already how I'm thinking and talking about this. Feedback loops. This is actually related to something you said earlier about even how skyscrapers stay in the air. The whole point is control theory. You actually want to, or even how an airplane stays, you need to have control loops which are feedbacking in the right way. And what we observed was that the feedback control loop for controlling disease by asking people to be removed from society against their will was not working. It was running against human incentives and you suddenly are trying to control 7 billion, 8 billion people in ways that they don't individually want to necessarily do. So here's the idea. And this is inspired by the fact that at the core of our team were user experience designers. That's actually, in fact, the first”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the idea is like this if we describe how usually people control disease for a lot of history, it was that you'd find out who was sick, you'd find out who they have been around, and you'd try to remove all of those people from society against their will.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network theory, which is the area of math that I work in, could potentially be combined with smartphones and some kind of health information anonymized. Exactly how we didn't know yet. We tried to crystallize it. And many months into this work, we ended up accidentally discovering a new way to control diseases, which is now what is the main impetus of all of this work, is to take this idea and polish it and hopefully have it be useful not only now, but for future pandemics. The idea is really simple to describe. Actually, my main thing in the world is I come up with obvious observations. So I'll explain it now.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. So, first, I want to make sure that I say this is actually team effort. I happen to be the one speaking, but there's no way this would exist without an incredible team of people who inspire me every day to work on this. But I'll speak on behalf of them. The idea was indeed that we stepped forward in March of last year when the world started to become our part of the world, started to become our part, meaning the United States started to become paralyzed by COVID. The shutdown started to happen. At that time, it started as a figment of an idea which was”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what I mean? And then together we're going to come up with a proof of this concept where you were deeply involved in creating the proof. Actually, every time I teach the class, we do every proof slightly differently because it's based on how the students came up with it. And that's how I do it when I'm in person. I also have another line of courses that we make that is delivered online. Those things are where I can't do it live. But the teaching method became also similar. It was just, here's an interesting question. I know it's out of reach. Why don't you think about it? And then automatic hints, we feed automatic hints through the internet to go and let the person try to invent.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So the way that I guess I have two different sort of ways that I try to teach actually one of them is, in fact, this semester because all my classes were remotely delivered. I even threw them all onto my YouTube channel. So you can see how I teach at Carnegie Mellon. But I'd often say, hey, everyone, let's try to do this. Any ideas? And that actually changes my role as a professor from a person who shows up for class with a script of what I want to talk through. I actually, I don't have a script. The way I show up for class is there is something that we want to learn how to do and we're going to do it by improv. I'm talking about the same method as improv comedy, which is where you tell me some ideas and I'll try to yes and them.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiresome this heart anymore. That rewardingness heart of I have the capability of looking at something which I don't know what to do and coming up with how to do it. I actually think we should be doing that, giving people that capability.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually prefer to say, here's an interesting question. I know you don't quite know how to do it. Do you have any ideas? I'm actually coming up with, I'm actually explaining another way that you could try to do teaching. And I'm contrasting this to a method of watch me do this, now practice it 20 times. I'm trying to say a lot of people consider math to be hard because maybe they can't remember all of the methods that were taught. But for me, I look at the hardness and I don't think of it as a memory hardness. I think of it as a, can you invent something hardness? And I think that if we can teach more people how to do that art of invention in a pure cognitive way, not as hard as the actual hardware stuff, right? But like in terms of the concepts and the thoughts and the mathematics, teaching people how to invent, then suddenly actually they might not even find math to be that”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think maybe I want to dig in a little bit into this hard part and say, I think the interesting thing about the math is that you can see a question that you didn't know how to start doing it before. And over a course of thinking about it, you can come up with a way to solve it. And so you can move from a state of not being able to do something to a state of being able to do something where you help to take yourself through that instead of somebody else spoon feeding you. Technique. So actually, here I'm already digging into maybe part of my teaching philosophy also, which is that I actually don't want to ever just tell somebody, here's how you do something.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, I think I've always been very attracted to challenge, as I already indicated with the writing the program. I guess if I see something that's hard or supposed to be impossible. Sometimes I say, maybe I want to see if I can pull that off. And with the mathematics, the math competitions presented problems that Heart that I didn't know how to start, but for which I could conceivably try to learn how to solve them. So, I mean, there are other things that are hard called like get something to Mars, get people to Mars. And I didn't, and I still don't think that I'm able to solve that problem. On the other hand, the math problem struck me as things which are hard and with significant amount of extra work, I could figure it out, and maybe they would actually even be useful. Like that mathematical skill is the core of lots of other things.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so because, especially with the work that I've been doing nowadays, even trying to control COVID, something that was very helpful from day one was understanding that the kinds of computations we would want to do we could conceivably do on like a four-core cloud machine on Amazon Web Services out to a population which might have hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The reason why that was important to have that back of the envelope calculation with efficient algorithms is because if we couldn't do that, then we would bankrupt ourselves before we could get to a big enough scale. If you think about how you grow anything from small to big, if in order to grow it from small to big, you also already need 10,000 cloud servers, you'll never get to big.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I always was amazed by how computers could do things fast. If I wanted to make it an abstract analysis of why it is that I saw some power in the computer. Because if the computer can do things so many times faster than humans where the hard part is telling the computer what to do and how to do it, if you can master asking the computer what to do, then you could conceivably achieve more things. And those contests I was in, those were the opposite in some sense of making a complete product. Like a game is a product. Those contests were effectively write a function to do something extremely efficiently. And if you are able to do that, then you can unlock more of the power of the computer.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. The primitive that I got to use was some code I copied off of a book in assembly of how to put a pixel on a screen in a particular color.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, in high school, I was lucky enough to grow up in the late 90s when even a high school student could hope to make something sort of comparable to the shareware games that were out there. I say the word sort of, like still quite far away, but at least I didn't need to hire a 3D CG artist. There weren't enough pixels to draw anyway, even I can draw, right? Bad art, of course. But the point is, I wanted to know, is it possible for me to try to do those things where back in those days, you didn't even have an easy way to draw letters on the screen in a particular font. You couldn't just say import a font. It wasn't like Python. So, for example, back then, if you play those games in the web browser, which is emulating the old school computer, even the letters you see, those are made by individual calls to draw pixels on the screen.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, could you? But the appealing thing was also soup to nuts kind of thing. So something that has always attracted me is I like beautiful ideas. I like seeing beautiful ideas. But I actually also like seeing execution of an idea all the way from beginning to end in something that works”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do, especially when there's turbulence, which is, you know, like on the way here, there was turbulence and the plane jiggled, even the flight attendant had to hold on to the side. And I was just thinking to myself, it's amazing that this happens all the time and the wings don't fall off. You know, like given how many planes are flying. But then I often think about it and I'm like, you know, a long time ago, I think people didn't trust elevators. A 40-story building in New York City. And now we just take it completely for granted that you can step into this shaft, which is 40 floors up and down. And it will just not fail.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source