alt Hacker Newsnegative temperature in this case is a sampling thing. When you sample from a table of tokens, the equation for the probability of token i is p_i = exp(logit_i/T) / sum_j(exp(logit_j/T))
Not really related to molecular dynamics temperature except superficially in terms of phenomenology (higher temperature crosses activation barriers in the joint probability landscape). Negative temperature makes no sense in MD
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the__alchemist • yesterday at 9:08 PM
Yea.... after a reread, I think this article may be getting at something else. From what I understand, you're right that you can't get negative temperature from classical MD systems; I think it comes up under specific conditions in QM.
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In a way, negative temperature is higher than the highest positive temperature. High positive temperatures just gives you a uniform distribution on all possible tokens, highly negative temperatures is the same behavior. As you reach the low-negatives, you place more and more weight on unlikely tokens.
This makes more intuitive sense if inverse temperature is the physically relevant quantity, since you then have a smooth change as you cross from positive inverse temperature into negative, with zero standing for a uniform distribution and high positive (resp. negative) inverse temperatures just placing more and more weight on likely (resp. unlikely) tokens.