Mucho grapho, mucho Cayley
, or how I learned to love oh-so-big graphs
Today’s post will mark me getting my feet wet with OSS graphs, then we’ll explore the dangers of sharp objects and finally - an alternative paradigm for depranxiety treatment!
CayleyPy absoluto!
So recently I’ve become engaged (not in THAT way, the chances are slimmer than a meth-addicted go-go dancer) with a peculiar project, CayleyPy. The initiative is building a library and a set of methods for working with indecently large graphs - 10¹⁰⁰ and potentially even bigger.
Why?
Graphs are a fickle mistress - they’re extremely useful in today’s data science yet sometimes tricky to work with. One of possible tasks is finding a shortest path. Sure, you may say - there are algorithms, lol - but not for graphs like these, e.g. state transition graphs.
Any use apart from this meme?
Say, you’re a biologist, and your task (your life depends on it!) is determining how long it could take to turn a presumed prehistoric cockroach into his less-monstrous cousin. As the base pairs are stacked like pancakes, and they ‘flip’ like pancakes do during recombination, we’re able to estimate the minimal number of flips to go from state n to state n* - the so-called **evolutionary distance!
A much more pertinent question…
Another possible uses are automated planning graphs:
Or solving puzzles as an awesome, algorithmically and math-intensive proxy:
Currently the project is doing a lot of puzzlesolving (I’ve even become a co-author for the first time 🥹 I’d like to thank my mom my dad Buddha and Leo Tolstoy), approaching and exceeding SOTA results for these types of tasks.
Who counts the God?
The team had also launched a couple of Kaggle competitions to find the optimal solutions for some of the puzzles, the majority are underrepresented in research (i.e. no optimal solutions exist yet, or the God’s number is unknown). BTW, God’s number solution is the one we’re almost always looking for - the shortest possible path to a ‘solved’ state from any arbitrary one. Yeah, this one:
God’s numbers (which is theologically incorrect, as he’s Ein Sof, literally Endless or Infinite) for a couple of puzzles are updated here. And yeah, it is potentially generalizable over to healthcare, planning, etc.
Oh, and remember the evolutionary distance? That’s basically the God’s number for pancake flipping of states n→n*.
Bottom line
Everyone interested in math/graphs/puzzles, looking for an OSS project to contribute and knowledge to attain, could potentially join (judging by the metrics that I could…)!
Newso
Don’t stick a pencil in your…
A take on the nature of Joker and pencils! Apparently, one should only trip with a sitter if unexperienced, and there should be no sharp objects nearby - a guy pencil-blasted his own eyesockets ➡️ brain, which is not a good way to go.
On the day of the incident, he returned home from work and consumed an unknown amount of psilocybin mushrooms.
Despite attempts by his stepfather and brother to calm him down,…
…he placed a pencil upright on his desk and repeatedly drove his head onto it, penetrating both of his eye sockets.
PACAPon, DEPRoff
Another news is a good one - one of the ~novel pathways seems to hold some promise in treating depression!
Drug: PA-915, PAC1 small molecule antagonist
Research team: Yusuke Shintani et al. @ University of Osaka, Kobe University School of Medicine, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine etc.
Mechanism: antagonist for PAC1, pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide receptor (responsible for a lot of things, not the least of which is stress regulation)
Additional considerations:
PA-915 did not inhibit PACAP-induced VPAC1 and VPAC2 receptor activation or VIP-induced PAC1 receptor activation - important
PACAP, the peptide itself, seems to be neuro- and nephroprotective - some through PAC1 receptor. We’ll see. Protective image from here.
- PAC1 antagonism may be a mechanism for headaches, too!
Bottom line
The results look promising, although I’d be keen to seeing long-term implications (as always…) - the pathway seems to generally regulate stress-mediated protection/regeneration, so it’s a low-level one, and there will be blood implications: with the amount of bodily mechanisms and pathways affected by PACAP, the research will need to proceed carefully for the fear of something important going off-rail as time goes, e.g. follicular apoptosis (men, don’t fear this one).
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