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Replication reports
0 papersNo replication reports yet. They appear here, separately from essays, as they are published.
- September 1, 2026Revised September 1, 202634 min readEssayEnergyAIMaterialsEngineering
The Exponent Is the Price: Quantum Tunneling and the Architecture of Wireless Electric Grids
The phrase "wireless power transfer by quantum tunneling" is, read literally, a category error. Single-particle electron tunneling through a vacuum or dielectric barrier is suppressed as with for a metal–vacuum–metal junction. Deliv…
Oleksii Vergunenko - September 1, 2026Revised September 16, 202635 min readEssayRoboticsAIEconomics
Cybercab, Robotaxi Fleets, and the Economic Structure of Autonomous Mobility
The dominant public argument about autonomous ride-hailing treats the driver as a cost line to be deleted. This paper argues that the driver is not a cost line but a bundle of four distinct economic functions — labor, distributed capital provision, liability absorption, and deman…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 31, 2026Revised September 16, 202637 min readEssayBioTechChemistryMedicineEngineering
Target Detection as the Rate-Limiting and Specificity-Limiting Step in CRISPR Genome Editing
CRISPR-Cas genome editing is usually described as a cutting technology. It is more accurately described as a search technology with a cutting terminus. The chemistry of phosphodiester hydrolysis is unremarkable; nucleases have performed it for billions of years. What is remarkabl…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 30, 202613 min readEssayComputePhysicsMaterialsEngineering
TEMPO: A Time-Domain Ferroelectric Compute-in-Memory Macro with Drift-Cancelling Twin Cells and Significance-Ordered Early Termination
The energy cost of moving data between memory and processing units now dominates the energy cost of arithmetic itself, often by two to three orders of magnitude for off-chip access. Compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures attack this bottleneck by performing multiply-accumulate (MA…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 30, 202612 min readEssayEnergyPhysics
Muon-Catalyzed d–³He Fusion as a Permission Structure: A Specification for Net-Positive Energy Balance
Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF) of deuterium and helium-3 combines two attractive properties: an aneutronic reaction (d + ³He → p + α, Q = 18.35 MeV) whose products are entirely charged particles amenable to direct electric conversion, and a catalysis mechanism that operates at low t…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised August 29, 202616 min readEssayEnergyPhysicsMaterialsEngineering
The Micro Black Hole Energy Converter: A Specification-Driven Assessment of Hawking-Radiation Power Extraction
A black hole of mass 10⁸–10⁹ kg radiates its entire rest-mass energy as Hawking emission over years to decades at sustained power of order 10¹⁶–10¹⁷ W, making it the most mass-efficient energy converter permitted by known physics: effective conversion efficiency approaches unity,…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised August 29, 202614 min readEssayComputeAIMethods
The Recursive Self-Improvement Loop: A Specification, Not a Prophecy
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) — the process by which an intelligent system improves its own capacity to improve itself — is usually discussed in one of two failure modes: as an inevitability (the "intelligence explosion" reading) or as an impossibility (the "diminishing return…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised September 16, 202617 min readEssayComputePlatformAIMethods
Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humanity: Problem Structure, Current Approaches, and Open Problems
The alignment problem asks whether advanced artificial intelligence systems can be made to reliably pursue objectives compatible with human values and intentions, and to continue doing so as their capabilities scale beyond the capacity of humans to directly supervise them. This p…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised August 29, 202615 min readEssayBioTechAIChemistryMedicineEngineering
From the Virtual Cell to the Human Digital Clone: A Specification for Whole-Body In Silico Physiology
Two research programs that developed largely in isolation — the AI virtual cell (bottom-up, data-driven models of cellular state and perturbation response) and the medical digital twin (top-down, physics-based models of organs and physiology) — are converging toward a shared obje…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised September 16, 202612 min readEssayComputeAIMethods
Alignment as Specification: A Survey of Technical AI Safety and Its Open Problems
As machine learning systems approach and exceed human performance on economically significant tasks, the question of whether their behavior can be reliably specified, verified, and controlled has moved from philosophical speculation to an active engineering discipline. This paper…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised September 16, 202626 min readEssayComputeBioTechPlatformAIMethods
The Verification Oracle Determines the Ceiling: Why Artificial Intelligence Advances Unevenly Across Mathematics, Physics, and Biology
Between mid-2025 and mid-2026, artificial intelligence systems moved from competition-level performance to contributions at the research frontier in mathematics, while in physics and biology the same underlying models were deployed largely as surrogates, controllers, and hypothes…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised September 16, 202623 min readEssayBioTechRoboticsChemistryMaterialsEngineering
Engineered Living Materials as Robotic Integuments: Platforms, Specifications, and a Bandwidth Argument for Hybrid Skin
Engineered living materials (ELMs) — materials in which living cells are a load-bearing, functional component rather than a contaminant — have been proposed as a covering layer for robots. Three platforms have produced physical demonstrations: tissue-engineered mammalian dermis a…
Oleksii Vergunenko - August 29, 2026Revised August 30, 202619 min readEssayComputeAIPhysicsMaterialsEngineering
Multiplication Without Transistors: An Audit of Photonic Matrix Processors as Accelerators for Large Language Model Training
Matrix multiplication accounts for the overwhelming majority of arithmetic operations — and a dominant share of energy expenditure — in training large language models (LLMs). Photonic processors perform matrix–vector multiplication (MVM) as a passive consequence of light propaga…
Oleksii Vergunenko