6 ms·
High school student discovers 1.5M potential new astronomical objects
- iwontberude 10mo agoIs this important? I see we have a model which has not found anything officially, has been validated by no one nor has the science reproduced.
- uolmir 10mo agoSeveral of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
- _9za9 10mo ago$10,000 to $20,000 in GPU costs over a couple months. I had $20 per week in highschool. Benefit of being rich is you are awarded opportunities.
- andai 10mo agoWhere is this number from?
- prodigycorp 10mo agoYou triggered an old memory of mine in high school of when I ran for class president in senior year and campaign spending was capped at $100 dollars and someone else flagrantly violated campaign finance rules and spent at least a thousand dollars primarily distributing pencils that would go on to litter the campus’ every corner.
- jihadjihad 10mo agoDid they win the election?
- prodigycorp 10mo agoYes. It was a close friend who told me he wasn’t running prior to the nomination deadline. I had done some strong analytics and figured I had great odds. Then I learned, from the dean, that he was running. He split my vote. I learned a lot about life from that experience lol.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agowhy would one throw away pencils?
- dylan604 10mo agoWhy would any one dump a load of tea in the bay?
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agoto be a terrorist, obviously
- rr808 10mo agoMost school students these days never have to write anything.
- MontyCarloHall 10mo agoFrom the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech." That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him: "I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set." [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
- why-o-why 10mo agoThe post you were replying to is about privilege, then you defend with: "but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:" These two things are effectively the same.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> The post you were replying to is about privilege The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false. I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
- why-o-why 10mo ago>> I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head. EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.
- parpfish 10mo agoMaybe I’m cynical, but whenever I read about a high school kid making a science breakthrough I assume this is what happened (based partially on personal experience): - the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application - PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid. - kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
- jeremyscanvic 10mo agoDo you have any evidence to back this up? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity
- parpfish 10mo agoOther than personal experience of having my PI tell me to hand over my own almost-done experiments to his friends kids?
- laidoffamazon 10mo agoThis is how it works 99% of the time This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it for twenty years or more. They live in a completely different world from the rest of us and they hate us for it.
- Aurornis 10mo agoAdmissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic is for high school students to have their startup company “acquired” by their parents’ friends company, where the acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring the kid for an internship. It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist. With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
- andai 10mo agoHere is the paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
- RestartKernel 10mo agoVery good work for a high schooler, but explaining backpropagation and cross entropy loss is typical of ML paper-mill, though the feature extractor is interesting. These results really call for more domain-specific analysis to reach any significance deserving of headlines.
- theunixbeard 10mo agoMore behind-the-scenes info could be provided by HN's @JustinSkycak: * https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other things: * https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-years-later/ https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
- why-o-why 10mo agoThe article didn't say how accurate the predictions were. Too bad, that's the important part.
- hirako2000 10mo agoBecause there is no admitting what was found were predictions. Millions of entities, that will take years to verify the data. The interview is funny: when the winner was asked how he did it: I took that NASA database, and made the computer think... No more concrete. Oh yes they said AI and infrared, he even used infrared.
- tzs 10mo agoThe second paragraph of the article contains a link straight to the paper, which is open access.
- moffkalast 10mo agoAll they know is his gut says maybe.
- awacs 10mo ago[flagged]
- tantalor 10mo ago> potential As in, not validated? How do we know this algorithm is any good?
- krick 10mo agoWe don't. To be fair, it was a "science and math competition for high school seniors". If it wasn't, it would be just some paper on arxiv, and nobody would be reporting it. And for sure the guy who did this kind of research wouldn't be awarded $250K for it. So, uh… yeah. That's it. A guy was chosen by the jury as the winner of highschool-talent competition and won $250K. Good for him. The 3rd place is a proof for some Ramsey-like problem it seems, though.
- cramcgrab 10mo agoAI is great!
- throw27 10mo agoAmerican kids are super smart
- pinkmuffinere 10mo agoI don’t know if the comment really adds to the conversation at all, but surely the comment should just be “kids are super smart”, if anything
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 10mo agoMost archival astro data have a lot of junk in them. Most of it is not worth the time of serious astronomers, because it's all rather inconsequential or incremental finding the Nth example of something rather than N=1. A good project for a high schooler as an exercise and signaling, but ultimately nothing will come from this work.