generativity
Last edited: August 8, 2025big red Chomskian structuralist warning
The principle of generativity states that the goal of a grammar should be to enumerate the span of the structural descriptions of the expressions of a language.
generics
Last edited: August 8, 2025We don’t want to write the same thing many times; generics minimizes code duplication. Therefore, generics!
Let’s implement a simple swap function:
void swap_ptr_values(void *data1ptr, void *data2ptr, size_t datasize) {
}
helper functions
memcpy
Copy datasize bytes worth of memory in the second argument into the first argument. The two arguments CANNOT OVERLAP otherwise, you risk UB.
void *memcpy(void *dest, void *src, size_t nbytes)
memmove
Its memcpy, but it works with overlapping data, and is slower.
void *memove(void *dest, void *src, size_t nbytes)
pointer arithmetic with generics
Unfortunately, given that we don’t know how big a void * pointer is, we can’t do pointer arithmetic against it because it still doesn’t know how big the pointer is. You can’t just add/subtract numbers to char *.
genetic algorithm
Last edited: August 8, 2025A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that is inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural evolution.
Its what Grey’s video says. The picking and chucking iterative thing.
Genetic Policy Search
Last edited: August 8, 2025Genetic Policy Search involves performing Local Policy Search, but starting from a plurality of initial policies and perturbing the top-k most successful ones (called the “elite samples” \(m_{elite}\)) to generate the next set of starting points.
GenSLMs
Last edited: August 8, 2025GenSLMs are a LLM, but genome sequence
- Take genome sequence
- Throw transformers at it
- create “semantic embedding”
- autoregression happens
This is trained as a foundational model to organize the genomic sequence
Turns out, the embedding space above can be used to discover relations. See proteins can be encoded as hierarchies
