# Mucho grapho, mucho Cayley 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](https://www.besteveraba.com/blog/do-autistic-people-get-married)) with a peculiar project, [CayleyPy](https://github.com/cayleypy/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem), lol - but not for graphs like these, e.g. state transition graphs. ![](https://i.imgflip.com/a7og21.jpg align="center") 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](https://hussainather.com/2014/09/04/genetic-inversions-bill-gates-and-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**! ![](https://i.ibb.co/21Mc925S/image.png align="center")
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A great explanatory slide deck is here!
A much more pertinent question… ![](https://i.ibb.co/S45CzHg1/image.png align="center") Another possible uses are automated planning graphs: ![](https://i.ibb.co/9mX0ZMdC/image.png align="center") Or solving puzzles as an awesome, algorithmically and math-intensive proxy: ![](https://i.ibb.co/24DC816/image.png align="center") Currently the project is doing a lot of puzzlesolving (I’ve even [become a co-author](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19162) 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](https://github.com/cayleypy/cayleypy?tab=readme-ov-file#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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_algorithm) 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: ![](https://i.ibb.co/VpS029hS/image.png align="center") God’s numbers (which is theologically incorrect, as he’s [Ein Sof, literally Endless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Sof) or Infinite) for a couple of puzzles are updated [here](https://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php?title=God%27s_Algorithm). 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… ![](https://i.ibb.co/39S6W8Qv/image.png align="center") A take on the [nature of Joker and pencils](https://www.psypost.org/21-year-old-man-dies-after-jabbing-pencil-into-his-brain-during-psilocybin-trip/)! 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](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-pa-molecule-antidepressant-effects-common.html) - one of the ~novel pathways [seems to hold some promise](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03209-4) in treating depression! ![](https://i.ibb.co/FLF4B8bD/image.png align="center") **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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADCYAP1R1) (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](https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/20/19/4944) - some through PAC1 receptor. We’ll see. Protective image from [here](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7381171/). ![](https://i.ibb.co/846ML3kF/image.png align="center") * PAC1 antagonism [may be a mechanism](https://thejournalofheadacheandpain.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s10194-018-0893-8#Sec1) for headaches, too! ### Bottom line ![](https://i.ibb.co/fGvk4RfP/image.png align="center") 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). --- Welcome to **Teleogenic**❣️ Other places I cross-post (not always) to: * [**Hashnode**](https://posts.teleogenic.com) * [**Medium**](https://baldr.medium.com/) * [**Telegram**](https://t.me/ohmyboi) * [**Twitter**](https://twitter.com/ZakharKogan) * [**LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakhar-kogan/)