Attention is all you need for color theory!

When I was learning about Transformers, and trying to understand the attention mechanism, I wanted to start with a minimal example. My idea was to use color palettes! I had a couple of motivations for this:

• Color palettes are unordered sequences of 3-vectors
• "Good" color palettes have a pretty clear relationship amongst its members
• There are conditional features that drastically change the relationship between the members, namely the palette type
• Color palettes are pretty to look at, useful, and meaningful to humans!

Parallel simulation of rod-like molecules suspended in a vertical sheet of evaporating solution.

In my high performance computing course I learned about distriibuted computing, a skill that I will surely use to great effect in my career. The final project for that course was a parallel simulation of rod-like molecules suspeneded in a drying solution. By varying the drying rate, the length of the rods, and the concentration of the solution, we were able to observe a variety of interesting phenomena. Here are some videos of the simulation in action!