jonbarron · Abhinav-Muraleedharan · Dec 8, 2023 · Dec 8, 2023 · Dec 17, 2023 · Dec 17, 2023
diff --git a/CNAME b/CNAME
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+abhinavmuraleedharan.com
diff --git a/data/Abhinav_Muraleedharan_CV_Dec.pdf b/data/Abhinav_Muraleedharan_CV_Dec.pdf
diff --git a/data/Abhinav_Muraleedharan_CV_Sep.pdf b/data/Abhinav_Muraleedharan_CV_Sep.pdf
diff --git a/data/JonBarron-bio.txt b/data/JonBarron-bio.txt
@@ -1,9 +1 @@
-Jon Barron is a senior staff research scientist at Google Research in San
-Francisco, where he works on computer vision and machine learning. He received
-a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013,
-where he was advised by Jitendra Malik, and he received a Honours BSc in
-Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2007. He received a National
-Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2009, the C.V. Ramamoorthy
-Distinguished Research Award in 2013, and the PAMI Young Researcher Award in
-2020. His works have received awards at ECCV 2016, TPAMI 2016, ECCV 2020, ICCV
-2021, CVPR 2022, the 2022 Communications of the ACM, and ICLR 2023.
+I am a graduate student at the University of Toronto. At UofT, I work under the supervision of Prof. Nathan Wiebe. I'm interested in theoretical aspects of reinforcement learning and quantum computing.
diff --git a/data/MEng_thesis_v2.pdf b/data/MEng_thesis_v2.pdf
diff --git a/data/abhinav_bdp.bib b/data/abhinav_bdp.bib
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+@article{muraleedharan2023beyond,
+  title={Beyond dynamic programming},
+  author={Muraleedharan, Abhinav},
+  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.15029},
+  year={2023}
+}
diff --git a/data/thesis.pdf b/data/thesis.pdf
diff --git a/formal_analysis_of_life.html b/formal_analysis_of_life.html
@@ -0,0 +1,120 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
+    <title>Formal Analysis of Life</title>
+    <style>
+        body {
+            font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
+            line-height: 1.6;
+            margin: 0;
+            padding: 20px;
+            background-color: #e2d1d1;
+            color: #000000;
+        }
+        header, footer {
+            background: #e2d1d1;
+            color: #090808;
+            padding: 5px 0;
+            text-align: center;
+        }
+        header {
+            margin-bottom: 10px;
+        }
+        article {
+            background: #e8dfdf;
+            padding: 20px;
+            margin: 0 auto;
+            margin-bottom: 20px;
+            border-radius: 8px;
+            box-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(142, 134, 134, 0.1);
+            max-width: 800px;
+        }
+        h1, h2, h3, h4 {
+            color: #020202;
+            font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;
+            font-size: xx-large;
+        }
+        h2, h3, h4 {
+            color: #141313;
+        }
+        p {
+            margin: 1em 0;
+        }
+    </style>
+    <script src="https://polyfill.io/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=es6"></script>
+    <script id="MathJax-script" async src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"></script>
+</head>
+<body>
+    <header>
+        <h1>Formal Analysis of Life</h1>
+        <p> Abhinav Muraleedharan</p>
+        <p><time datetime="2024-06-30">June 30, 2024</time></p>
+    </header>
+
+    <article>
+        <section>
+            <h2>Death</h2>
+            <p>Any discussion about life should start with death. Death is the singular event that adds infinite value to every single second of human life. Hence, the most important task in any person's life is to figure out how to optimally allocate this resource of infinite value (time).</p>
+            <p>On a day to day basis, in our professional lives, we deal with questions like: What projects should we work on? Who should we spend time with? What books should I spend time reading? Which job/company should I choose?</p>
+            <p>There are two ways to answer these questions. The first way, as many people do, is to compute the return on any selected choices and choose the one with the maximum expected cumulative return. In the context of selecting projects or jobs, this would mean one should choose one that provides the highest return/salary.</p>
+            <p>This line of thinking however ignores the first point which we mentioned. Every second of our life is of infinite value. However, the return on any project is finite. Should we waste time by spending it on projects that have limited significance? Or should you work on the grand open challenges in science or at the frontiers of technology? If not monetary value, how to make decisions that might look sub-optimal in the short term, but optimal in the long term? The big shift here is that we consider time as the only currency we have, and see life decisions as investments of time, in some form.</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>Defining 'Purpose'</h2>
+            <p>Mathematically, physical systems can be seen as optimization engines, minimizing some functional over time. For instance, the dynamics of a pendulum is defined by the minimization of the Lagrangian, \( L = \int ( T(t) -V(t) )dt \). Your brain is a physical system, and you can view it as an optimization engine. In the case of the brain, assuming some notion of free will, we will have some access to choosing the form of the Lagrangian functional.</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>The Optimization Problem</h2>
+            <p>Pure Impact</p>
+            <p>\[ J =  \int_{t=0}^{T} I(t) \]</p>
+            <p>Pure Understanding</p>
+            <p>\[ J =  \int_{t=0}^{T} U(t) \]</p>
+            <p>Understanding + Impact</p>
+            <p>\[ J =  \int_{t=0}^{T} I(t) + U(t) \]</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>Power</h2>
+            <p>After choosing the functional, now comes the difficult part. Computing actions that would minimize the functional over a long time horizon. This step is difficult, because for instance, say if your goal is to understand the universe, then your actions would involve proof steps to solve the open problems in theoretical physics, or in other words- solving the open problems. If your choice is to maximize impact, then...</p>
+            <p>The word 'Power' has a bad connotation to it. People think power is evil, and often mistrusts people of power. Power simply means how much control you have over the state of the world. Can you drive the state of the world to the state you desire? Power can be roughly categorized into three.</p>
+
+            <h3>A Rough Classification</h3>
+            <h4>Political Power</h4>
+            <p>Political power simply means how much you can influence the behavior of another person by communication. If you're charismatic, a great speaker, then you'll have a high degree of power over other people.</p>
+            <h4>Intellectual Power</h4>
+            <p>Intellectual power is proportional to how deeply you can think about a topic without losing attention.</p>
+            <h4>Economic Power</h4>
+            <p>Economic Power is proportional to the amount of money you have in the bank.</p>
+
+            <h3>Exponential Ascent and Exponential Descent</h3>
+            <p>The most important thing to keep in mind regarding power is that there are only two trajectories of power. As you acquire more power, you have a much better chance of growing power. Either you acquire power exponentially, or your power decays exponentially into death.</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>Qualities</h2>
+            <h3>Attention (Focus)</h3>
+            <p>...</p>
+            <h3>Perseverance</h3>
+            <p>...</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>Birth</h2>
+            <p>This article began with death. Although all we have is finite time in this universe of infinite complexity, having been born as a sentient being is a thing by itself. What's the probability of me writing this article and you reading this? Close to zero. The ultimate gift in one's life is life itself. Being alive, pondering the big questions, is a gift. Go and make every second count.</p>
+        </section>
+
+        <section>
+            <h2>Acknowledgements</h2>
+            <p>...</p>
+        </section>
+    </article>
+
+    <footer>
+        <p>© 2024 Abhinav Muraleedharan. All rights reserved.</p>
+    </footer>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/images/Abhinav.png b/images/Abhinav.png
diff --git a/images/House_Cup.png b/images/House_Cup.png
diff --git a/images/UofT.png b/images/UofT.png
diff --git a/images/bdp.jpeg b/images/bdp.jpeg
diff --git a/images/misc.jpeg b/images/misc.jpeg