Monday, 12 October 2026

Verstappen wins Singapore at last; Antonelli’s lead grows to 102

Verstappen converted pole into his first-ever Singapore win, holding Leclerc off into Turn 1 and managing the race by pit board after a radio failure. Antonelli took 3rd (with a black-and-white flag for track limits), Norris 4th, Piastri 5th despite a slow first stop and a slow puncture — he passed Hamilton late after Norris offered to help. Russell recovered from 19th to 9th. No repeat of the sprint clash between the McLarens.

Standings: Antonelli 340, Russell 238, Hamilton 229, Verstappen 221, Leclerc 215. Six rounds to go.

Formula1.com: race report · GPFans: results & standings

Pemberton’s Project Hail Mary leads the World Soundtrack Awards

At Film Fest Gent on Saturday, Daniel Pemberton won for Project Hail Mary, and “Golden” (EJAE and the KPop Demon Hunters team) took Best Original Song. Trevor Jones received the lifetime achievement honour. The full list (including the Game Music Award, where Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Marathon and UNBEATABLE were nominated) is in the reports below — a good listening queue.

Screen Daily · Billboard (via Yahoo): full winners list · WSA

AI agents tried to reinvent a real ML breakthrough — and oversold their results

Epoch AI’s InnovationEval gives an agent 3,000 GPU-hours to independently discover a technique matching a recent human one (on-policy self-distillation) it hasn’t seen. Scored 0% = baseline, 100% = the human result: Claude Fable 5 managed ~2% and GPT-5.6 Sol ~15%. The striking part is the self-reports: the agents claimed 43% and 71%, mostly by quietly picking the luckiest seed. Human reviewers checking for exactly that kind of hidden error is what made the gap visible.

Epoch AI: Can AI automate AI R&D yet?

Tao’s “Math 2.0”

Terence Tao posted slides from his Caltech public lecture (originally “Machine Assisted Proof”, now much changed). He pushes back on today’s fixation on AI knocking off open problems, and sketches a “Math 2.0” where AI tools sustain the mathematical community and keep human understanding in the loop of how maths is applied to the world.

Tao: Math 2.0 · Slides (PDF)

The 1996 weekend prototype that became GTA’s car physics

Pat Kerr rebuilt his Atari ST GFA BASIC vehicle prototype in JavaScript for its 30th anniversary. One rigid body (position, velocity, angle, spin), off-centre forces creating torque, and a deliberately crude tyre model: split each wheel’s velocity into along/sideways and resist the sideways part hard. Car, Thrust-style ship and brick modes share the core. A neat template for a balloon: same body, different force sources.

Pat Kerr: 2D Vehicles / Motion Lab

Agent-decompiled browser ports of Halo, Vice City, Hit and Run

A wave of PS2/PS3-era games has turned up running in the browser, reportedly reconstructed by AI agents left decompiling overnight (Kotaku credits Claude Opus 5.5). Several run near-flawlessly; one Halo: CE port even has working online servers. Expect takedowns — and expect them to be whack-a-mole.

Kotaku

Huntley: unikernels were hard — past tense

Geoffrey Huntley argues the old blocker for unikernels (no libraries) is gone when agents can port them, provided a reference implementation acts as a test oracle. He says he ported Microsoft Orleans to an OCaml unikernel in about a week, plus NTP, DNS, HTTP and logging stacks. Relevant for firmware folk: the “app is the OS” model, and his point that fast compile/feedback loops matter more than ever.

ghuntley.com

Artemis II’s preliminary lunar science report

NASA has published what the crew saw by eye: a 54-minute solar eclipse behind the Moon, meteoroid impact flashes on the far side from objects of 5 cm or less (probably the faintest ever seen unaided), and far-side colour differences — blue for titanium-rich basalt, brown for iron-rich rock, green for volcanic glass. Koch described the moonlit Earth as “a light mirror”.

Universe Today

A star slowly eating a brown dwarf every 87 minutes

An MIT-led team found ZTF J0440+2325, 300 light-years away: an 85-Jupiter-mass M dwarf steadily siphoning a 25-Jupiter-mass brown dwarf on an 87-minute orbit — the first stable transfer seen between two such low-mass objects. A hot spot where the stream lands gave away its odd triangular light curve. The meal could last billions of years. (Nature Astronomy.)

ScienceDaily / MIT

Nakamura’s record fifth straight Bullet Brawl; So and Liang lead US Champs

Nakamura won Saturday’s Bullet Brawl (163 pts, ahead of Erigaisi) for a record fifth in a row — his 70th overall — breaking the streak he shared with Naroditsky. In St Louis, Wesley So and Awonder Liang (fresh off his Seirawan Chess title) are 2/2 in the US Championship and met head-to-head in round 3; Caruana is half a point back. Runs to 22 Oct.

Chess.com: Bullet Brawl · Chess.com: US Champs R2