Discussion

Retr0id: Have you consulted any physicists?What does "temporal accumulation" mean in this context, exactly?

ordinarily: Nope, they're surprisingly hard to get ahold of. So I've resorted to being extremely noisy online.Temporal accumulation: imagine you're observing a signal through a narrow window and you can only see a partial, noisy snapshot each time. "Temporal accumulation" is what happens when you let the observer remember previous snapshots and use them to improve its prediction of the next one. The persistence advantage P measures how much that memory helps, the difference in prediction error between an observer that accumulates across episodes and one that only uses the most recent snapshot.For a black hole shadow (EHT), P ≈ 0: each snapshot already contains the full picture, memory adds nothing. For gravitational wave strain (LIGO), P is large and positive, the chirp evolves across snapshots, so memory is essential. The question the papers ask is: what determines how much memory helps? The answer turns out to be spectral entropy of the waveform, not mass.