Giulio Ruffini

1/ 🧠 New in Computational Neuroscience: "Rosetta Stone of Neural Mass Models." We pr,ovide a unifying framework for translating between them, connecting the harmonic oscillator with Stuart-Landau, Wilson-Cowan, NMM1, and NMM2 (next generation). With @Castaldo_Fr, Raul de Palma Aristides, Pau Clusella, and Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo - arxiv.org/abs/2512.10982

@aakashgupta @grok I may be missing something. EEG features are certainly interesting and may indicate different engagement of circuits. But isn’t the relevant outcome behavioral — learning?

This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right. The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014. 67 students at Princeton. Longhand note-takers scored higher on conceptual questions. Became the most cited paper in every “ban laptops” argument on Earth. Then three separate labs tried to reproduce the result. Urry et al. at Tufts in 2021, 145 students. No effect. Morehead et al. in 2019, two experiments. No effect. A meta-analysis pooling eight similar studies. No effect. So why am I saying it’s still right? Because a 2023 Norwegian EEG study with 256 channels found something the behavioral research couldn’t measure. Handwriting produces theta and alpha connectivity patterns between parietal and central brain regions that typing does not produce. Those specific frequencies are the ones your hippocampus relies on for memory formation. Your brain treats handwriting as a motor-spatial problem. Five brain regions fire in coordination: premotor cortex, parietal cortex, cerebellum, fusiform gyrus, sensorimotor cortex. Typing activates a fraction of that network. The original study measured the right outcome with the wrong methodology. The real finding lives at the neural level: handwriting rewires the encoding process itself.

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. May God bless America.

First Proof is an an effort to see whether LLMs can contribute meaningfully to pure mathematics research. The dust has settled on round one, and the results are surprising. Another round is commencing. scientificamerican.com/article/as-ai-…

“Jensen framed the three inflections that got us here: ChatGPT started the generative era, o1 started the reasoning era, and Claude Code started the agentic era. He said “100 percent of NVIDIA is using a combination of Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. There’s not one software engineer today who is not assisted by one or many AI agents.”

All (algorithmic) agents welcome here! #kt

Our co-founder Terence Tao is announcing SAIR Foundation's inaugural competition: the Mathematics Distillation Challenge. Co-organized by @damekdavis, Terence Tao, and SAIR Foundation. competition.sair.foundation/competitions/m…

@vitrupo @grok can you expand on this?

I agree with this view, it falls in line with the idea of the “algorithmic agent” as a natural emergent persistent pattern in an algorithmic (mathematical) universe. The algorithmic agent is in this sense discovered, not invented. Related: mdpi.com/1099-4300/27/1… or mdpi.com/1099-4300/28/3…

Sam Altman says artificial intelligence may be discovered rather than invented. Deep learning may be closer to discovering a property of nature than inventing a new technology. Which suggests intelligence itself may follow a fundamental scientific principle we are only beginning to understand.

We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action. A few things I want to say about what this means and where we're going at @eonsys. 🧵

New Paper💡 Have you ever heard of grokking, a sudden transition from memorization to generalization? People have attributed grokking to weight decay, Fourier structure, optimization regimes, phase transitions, numerical effects… These can shape the training dynamics, but they don’t answer the core question: "what determines which representation the model learns, and why it generalizes?" We argue the key is intrinsic task symmetries. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.01968

@ronalhwang See also related work on the role of symmetry in world models: mdpi.com/1099-4300/27/1…

@ronalhwang Very interesting! Please consider submitting to our Entropy Special issue mdpi.com/journal/entrop…

Do you need to understand the world to survive in it? A classic 1970 cybernetics theorem says yes: "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system." But proving this mathematically for complex, unpredictable real-world scenarios has always been notoriously difficult. 2/5 In a new paper, "The Algorithmic Regulator" (published in Entropy), I tackle this using Algorithmic Information Theory and Kolmogorov Complexity. 🧠💻 It takes the classic Good Regulator Theorem and the Internal Model Principle and complements and extends them for non-linear, deterministic systems. 3/5 The paper looks at regulation as data compression. The proof shows that if a regulator successfully keeps a system (embedded in the world) stable (reducing the algorithmic complexity of its output), it mathematically must share "mutual algorithmic information" with the world with high probability. The key result: K(W∣R)mdpi.com/1099-4300/28/3…

😅 La historia del Vallvidrera Curling Club es de lo más estrafalario del ‘deporte’. Quedan cada año en el pantano de Vallvidrera (Barcelona) para ver si está congelado y juegan al curling. Fue fundado en 2019 y todavía no han podido jugar. Hoy, tampoco:

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance. In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

The planet is getting hotter, but one factor makes it hard to tell how hot it will get. Physicists and computer scientists are racing to solve the problem of clouds. @walkingthedot reports: quantamagazine.org/climate-physic…

Preguntan a Guardiola si el fútbol tiene herramientas para acabar con el racismo. Respuesta: -En las escuelas. Hay que pagar más a los profesores. Esas son las personas que deben estar bien pagadas. En las escuelas, no en el fútbol.