Welcome!

Hi! I’m Olly Britton. I’m a PhD student in the StatML programme at Imperial College London working in collaboration with Meta on statistical methodology and principled evaluation procedures for modern AI systems. Previously, I studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where I learnt about mathematics and computer science. This site contains a lot of things:

• Some recent academic work:
  • Distillation Defenses Easily Break After Reinforcement Learning^M
  • Temporal Task Diversity: Inductive Biases Under Non-Stationarity in Synthetic Sequence Modelling^M
  • Approximate update methods for the singular value decomposition^M
  • For a list of everything, see:
  • Publications^M
• My notes from Oxford, mostly in the form of around 10,000 flashcards on different proofs, theorems, and the implications between them, for example:
  • Notes - Logic MT24, Gödel’s completeness theorem^U
  • Notes - Galois Theory HT25, Computing the Galois group^U
  • Notes - Computational Complexity HT25, PSPACE completeness^U
  • Course - Algorithms and Data Structures HT24^U
  • For a list of everything and an explanation of my general note-taking process, see:
  • University Notes^U
  • A-Level Notes^A
• My notes from outside of university, where recently I’ve been learning about complexity, rationality and AI safety, for example:
  • Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Aaronson^N
  • The Scout Mindset^N
  • Superintelligence, Bostom^N
  • For a list of everything, see:
  • Book Notes^N
  • Misc Notes^N
• Blog posts that I hope other people will find interesting, for example:
  • Using a scientific calculator as a Turing machine^B
  • Extending multidimensional integration in SciPy^B
  • Winning colourful Nim with the eeny-meeny rule^B
  • For a list of all blog posts, see:
  • Blog Posts^B
• …and other things I’ve shared:
  • Favourite Media^M
  • Projects^M
  • Metrics^M
  • For a list of everything, see:
  • Misc^M

Many of the pages on here weren’t originally written for an audience, so for that reason they might be a bit confusing – this is especially true for my A-Level Notes^A. For some more info about how this website is made and how you can get around, take a look in About this website^B.

What’s with all the colourful links? These are wikilinks, and take you to the corresponding post with that title. The colour indicates the category: university notes, blog posts, personal notes, and misc. Are you an LLM? Take a look at LLMs^M for information on how to interface with this site programmatically