This was a very confusing article, full of filler. I couldn't stand to read the "detective story" style.
Sounds like the technique is for high-dimensional ellipsoids. It relies on putting them on a grid, shrinking, then expanding according to some rules. Evidently this can produce efficient packing arrangements.
I don't think there's any shocking result ("record") for literal sphere packing. I actually encountered this in research when dynamically constructing a codebook for an error-correcting code. The problem reduces to sphere packing in N-dim space. With less efficient, naive approaches, I was able to get results that were good enough and it didn't seem to matter for what I was doing. But it's cool that someone is working on it.
A better title would have been something like: "Shrink-and-grow technique for efficiently packing n-dimensional spheres"
Sounds like the technique is for high-dimensional ellipsoids. It relies on putting them on a grid, shrinking, then expanding according to some rules. Evidently this can produce efficient packing arrangements.
I don't think there's any shocking result ("record") for literal sphere packing. I actually encountered this in research when dynamically constructing a codebook for an error-correcting code. The problem reduces to sphere packing in N-dim space. With less efficient, naive approaches, I was able to get results that were good enough and it didn't seem to matter for what I was doing. But it's cool that someone is working on it.
A better title would have been something like: "Shrink-and-grow technique for efficiently packing n-dimensional spheres"