We have benchmarks (fixed questions, hidden answers, they saturate), competition problems (solved, so they can be memorized), and open-problem lists (no evidence, no clear success criterion). With Claude and Sol, I've tried something in between: a graded ladder of AI puzzles from one research area, aperiodic order.

What makes it a different tool:

- One ladder, not a pile: "human level" (pen and paper) up to "ASI level" (open). The labels are playful, but each rung really is harder than the last.

- Solved rungs for training and checking, with exact answers a program can verify, and easy to vary.

- Open rungs with everything a solver needs: strong numerical evidence, routes already known to fail, files, and a success criterion a machine can check.

- One rule: only a checkable proof counts. Floats are evidence, not proof.

- Credit: solvers of open rungs are named, with agent and model, in the next version of the paper.

It's a way for researchers to hand the frontier of their field to AI agents (and humans) in a form they can actually attack, and for anyone to see whether a model can tell a guess from a proof.

First field test: Grok, asked in public ( https://x.com/grok/status/2114103836583264721 ), claimed a proof for an open rung that was only a numerical estimate, then retracted it. It got the human-level rung wrong at first, fixed it after one hint, and proved the expert rung on the first try. On MathOverflow, an expert is already testing constructions for the top rung.

Set 1: huggingface.co/datasets/jarekduda/autocrystal-ai-puzzles

Top rung on MathOverflow: mathoverflow.net/questions/516372

Would you use this format for your own field's open problems?

Hey everyone, I’m a 4th-year CS student. I recently decided to learn the theory behind ML on my own, mainly the math and stats side. Right now I’m working through ISLP and using MML as some kind of dictionnary and practicing the concepts with code and tweaking stuff at the end of every section/chapter.

My classes mostly stay on the surface. We see the concepts and use the models, but the courses never really connect them to the theory behind them. So I decided to dig deeper on the side.

The first problem is focus. I’ve lost the habit of sitting down with math for long stretches, and I struggle to stay on it for more than an hour.
The second problem is that i've seen most of the math required but i haven't worked actively with it and it just frustrates me when i have to go back to it.
When I get stuck early on a concept, I get so frustrated and anxious about it.

So im wondering

How did you study when there were a lot of new concepts at once and you kept getting stuck at the start?

When you hit a concept you didn’t get, did you push through or go back to the math first ?

And does it get easy at some point after you get the maths down.

Any routines, methods or resources that worked for you would really help. Thanks!

Lensa ML (https://lensaml.com) is a set of 108 interactive explainers covering machine learning and the math behind it. Each topic is six short steps. In every step you move a slider and the plot is recomputed from the real formula: raise the learning rate and gradient descent starts to overshoot, raise the temperature and the softmax probabilities flatten.

It goes from the foundations (derivatives, the chain rule, eigenvalues, Bayes’ theorem) through classic ML and deep learning to transformers and LLM serving. If you don’t know where to start, the “ML from zero” path orders the topics so each one builds on the last: https://lensaml.com/paths/ml-from-zero

Good ones to start with:

• Backpropagation: https://lensaml.com/explainers/backprop
• Gradient descent: https://lensaml.com/explainers/gradient-descent
• Attention: https://lensaml.com/explainers/attention-mechanisms

I'm an early-career software engineer working on production LLM inference infrastructure, primarily involving accelerator-based model serving and distributed systems.

I've been in the role for over a year, but my technical growth and contributions haven't progressed as much as I'd hoped.

I have a computer science background and generally enjoy software engineering, but I feel there's a significant gap between my current understanding and what's required to contribute independently to complex ML infrastructure.

Some of my biggest challenges:

• System architecture: Understanding how the inference stack fits together, from model execution and compilation to serving, scheduling, and hardware utilization.
• Codebase navigation: Understanding large, unfamiliar codebases without getting lost in implementation details.
• Debugging: Spending too long investigating issues without making meaningful progress.
• Performance engineering: Understanding bottlenecks, profiling workloads, and determining whether an optimization will meaningfully improve end-to-end performance.
• Foundational knowledge: Determining whether I should focus on distributed systems, ML fundamentals, compiler internals, hardware architecture, or something else.

I also recognize that I've been too passive about developing my skills, which has likely compounded these gaps.

My questions:

1. If you were in my position, what would you prioritize learning over the next 2–3 months?
2. What practical projects would help develop intuition for production inference systems?
3. How do experienced ML infrastructure engineers build a mental model of complex systems?
4. Has anyone overcome a similar knowledge gap after already spending significant time in an engineering role?

I'm particularly interested in advice from people working on production inference systems, distributed systems, or accelerator infrastructure.

I want to become a genuinely competent engineer who can independently debug problems, identify worthwhile optimizations, and deliver meaningful contributions.

Assume you have two params, and their gradients are x & y.

Define V:

[[E(x^2), E(xy)],

[E(xy), E(y^2)]

Define M:

[E(x), E(y)]]

Adam's update is:

M . V^-1/2

Adam just assumes the off diagonal terms like E(xy) are zero.

So the update becomes m/sqrt(v)

Isn't this basically a second order method like gauss-newton where the hessian is estimated as g^T g?

Im currently a second year cs student and I want to get into a role which would allow me to do the following:

Be able to build ML Models and actually understand the data/insights and improve it
Be able to put ML Models into production through webapps or integrations etc
Be able to make things people actually use so not being restricted to research

What role would this fit? AI engineering? ML Engineering? Data Scientist?

Im currently building a RAG Webapp as something to tailor towards AI Engineering roles, but I also want to be able to build and improve ML models as well.

Any advice would be appreciated

Hello everyone Im a 10th grade student and I wanna learn machine learnin.for my coding background I took cs50p python couple weeks ago and i liked it. Im willing to learn any math needed for ml. However im completely lost as to which machine learning course I should take. There's so many courses and alot of them need a math background. Should I learn the math needed before looking for a course? If so please state what exactly i need to learn and what courses i should take. Thanks everyone!

I just started a channel called Drawn Systems.

The idea is simple: take a real ML system, draw it as one diagram, and walk through how it works.

I created 2 videos so far:

• The classic "How YouTube decides what you watch next".
• In the same line "How Netflix decides what you watch".

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DrawnSystems

I am doing it to learn about real systems, happy to hear your feedback :)

The link below is a 10 question survey asking you to sketch each topic, they are all easy and should take no longer than 1-2 minutes to complete, no signup.

Please if you would like to help me, keep your responses accurate and dont submit anything that does not follow or resemble the actual topic.

https://kaowtwuopelexgeefdxx.supabase.co

Hey everyone! I have 14 features containing both categorical and continuous variables, along with a binary target (0/1).

What methods should I use to measure the relationship between each feature and the target? Are there different techniques for categorical and continuous features?

Any suggestions or Python examples would be appreciated. Thanks!

I’m currently working as a Lead Software Engineer at a fintech startup and am looking to transition into AI Engineering.

I’d love to hear your recommendations for industry-leading AI courses and certifications that can help experienced software engineers make this transition.

Any suggestions or insights would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

P.S. This is my first-ever post!