Comment on "A Southern Tyrant Reptile"

Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation

[1] McLean et al. (2009) (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude that the SOI is a “dominant and consistent influence on mean global temperatures,” “and perhaps recen...

Staging the Tyrant on the Seventeenth-Century French Stage

The fable of the dragon tyrant.

This paper recounts the tale of a most vicious dragon that ate thousands of people every day, and of the actions that the king, the people, and an assembly of dragonologists took with respect thereof.

Reptile : A Distributed ILP Compiler

The past few years witnessed a dramatic shift in computer microprocessor design. Rather than continue with the traditional pursuit of increased sequential program performance, industry and academia alike chose to focus on distributed, multi-core designs. If multi-core designs are to maintain the decades-long trend of increased single threaded performance, compiler technology capable of converti...

Reptile: a Scalable Metalearning Algorithm

This paper considers meta-learning problems, where there is a distribution of tasks, and we would like to obtain an agent that performs well (i.e., learns quickly) when presented with a previously unseen task sampled from this distribution. We analyze a family of algorithms for learning a parameter initialization that can be fine-tuned quickly on a new task, using only firstorder derivatives fo...