About

Hi, I'm Guanni (Jenny) Qu.

I study mathematics, physics, and computer science at UC Davis and work on reinforcement learning for math AGI at Caltech.

• Reinforcement learning
  Distributional RL, RL with dynamic action space.
• QFT
• Math
  Allen Hatcher; 3-Manifolds; (Jean-Pierre Serre) A Course in Arithmetic.
• CTFs
  Team Squid Proxy Lover; crypto, pwn.
• Security
  SmartKuang.
• AI control
  

Other forms of self-entertainment:

• Skiing: Palisades Tahoe.
• Piano: Repertoire: (Chopin) Ballade No. 1 in G minor; (Mendelssohn) Andante and Rondo Capriccioso; (Beethoven) Sonata Op. 109; (Chopin) Fantasie Impromptu.
• GuanniGolf: 12k+ follower bilingual WeChat channel teaching golf slang, AI safety, EA concepts, QFT, math, and related topics.
• Golf
• Art: Art↗
• Reading list (excluding current and finished books, unordered):
  • Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
  • The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus)
  • Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Richard W. Hamming)
  • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport)
  • A Course in Arithmetic (Jean-Pierre Serre)
  • Local Fields (Jean-Pierre Serre)
  • Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity (John C. Baez and Javier P. Muniain)
  • Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd ed.) (Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto)
  • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (Stuart Russell)
  • Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning (Csaba Szepesvári)
  • Bandit Algorithms (Tor Lattimore and Csaba Szepesvári)
  • The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (Brian Christian)
  • Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption (Jean-Philippe Aumasson)
  • The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws (Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto)
  • High Output Management (Andrew S. Grove)
  • The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You (Rob Fitzpatrick)
  • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters)
  • The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (Steve Blank)
  • How Big Things Get Done (Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner)
  • Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
  • Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance)
  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (James Gleick)
  • Letters from a Stoic (Seneca)
  • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman)
  • You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Peter Sloterdijk)
  • Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint (John W. Milnor)
  • Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model (Matthew D. Schwartz)
  • Rational Points on Elliptic Curves (Joseph H. Silverman and John Tate)
  • How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (George Pólya)
  • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Steven Pinker)
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
  • Isaac Asimov stories (Isaac Asimov; e.g. I, Robot, “The Last Question”)
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R. Hofstadter)
  • Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
  • The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
  • Permutation City (Greg Egan)
  • The Player of Games (Iain M. Banks)
  • Blindsight (Peter Watts)
  • The Expanse (James S. A. Corey)
  • Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life (Bill Perkins)
  • Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow)
  • The Rebel (Albert Camus)
  • Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything (Michio Kaku)
  • The Last Lecture (Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow)
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
  • The Technological Republic (Alexander C. Karp)
  • Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin (Jason Lowery)

On-Policy Learning:

• 80/20 by default; stop at diminishing returns.
• Optimize for expected impact, not vibes.
• Meditation, yoga, gym, sleep, water: basic maintenance of hardware.
• Try not to overfit on any single datapoint, person, paper, job, or experience.
• Default reaction to chaos: contain, sleep, lift, then think.
• Choose actions that make myfive-years-from-now self maximally happy.
• Start at the North Star, plan backwards, then walk forwards.
• Slope of trajectory over current value of position.

Cool to think about:

• Visualizing 3-Manifolds
• What it would be like to live on the klein bottle
• The hat problem from elliot glazer
• GPU parallelization
• Visualizing p-adic field and p-adic ring
• How a golf ball compresses at impact
• Visualizing the vector space of all continuous functions on the interval [0, 1]
• Visualizing the vector space of all real valued sequences
• Visualizing how electromagnetic waves carrying information of different modulation schemes (ASK, FSK, PSK, QAM) fill the “empty” space around us
• What it feels like to be a plant/boulder/pebble/squirrel.

If you’re working on RL, QFT, AI security, or love CTFs, I’d love to talk.

Contact

Email: [email protected]