Minimalist, proactive, and pragmatic. love it. 😉

I had similar feelings... The piece of code for Adam is probably more impactful than the whole paper (from pragmatic pov)

A basic example from coding theory: if you know the distribution or frequency of characters occurrence, you can spend less bits when coding them (Hoffman code). So better compression requires better understanding of underlying distribution.

Exactly. I mean that's how evolution basically works. Only those who solve the tasks survive, even tho sometimes survivors' solutions are suboptimal. Biology conforms to reality. Not the other way.

i think policy gradient might be a counterexample. You dont need all vars that matters to do policy grad. Reward is all u need.

"We must gradient - we will gradient!"

Assuming it's not faking results, I guess they might just want to attract interested collaborators? Experienced engineer can reverse engineer a product given very limited information. Personal opinions.