Software, Geekery and other miscellany
Mindstorms is a book by Seymour Papert that was first published in 1980. Seymour Papert is the inventor of the LOGO programming language, and the book lays down the motivation for creating LOGO as a teaching aid for children.
When we talk about teaching aid, we probably conjure up something …
The idea of doing a computation within a special context isn't unique to quantum computing. Functional programming has a concept called the monad that does something similar. This is how it works: you have an input value and you want to perform a sequence of calculations within a certain special …
Even in quantum computers, many calculations are done using traditional circuits. What usually happens is that a bunch of calculations are done using traditional microprocessors and then there will be some hard algorithm that needs to run, things like prime factorisation or brute force search. There are the algorithms that …
"You can have a chocolate or ice cream. Which do you want?"
I posed this question to my son. To nobody's surprise, he rejected the choice and answered "Both". Repeating that he should only choose one of the options were in vain. What he knew very well was that the …
We have been talking the last few days about ChatGPT. One of the interesting things about a deep learning AI system is how it 'stores' knowledge.
In traditional computing systems, we can point to part on the storage device and say "these bytes are stored here" and "these other bytes …
On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:
You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?
If you ask a normal …
Back to Taleb's tweet
Yesterday we discussed about probability space vs consequence space. Taleb says: What ChatGPT is missing that while academia is in probability space, life is in consequence space.
What does this mean?
Here is where we need to understand how ChatGPT works. When you ask a question …
Since I have been writing about unexpected statistical outcomes due to skews in the dataset, I thought I'd take a look at Nassim Taleb's twitter to see what he has been tweeting about. I came across this tweet
This is quite an interesting tweet. Taleb mentions two terms: Probability space …
Here is another day to day situation where statistics can be very unintuitive.
Lets say we have a medical test that has 99 % accuracy. You take the test and it comes out positive. What is the chance that you are actually positive? Common sense would suggest that there is a …
I routinely come across day to day situations where statistics can be very unintuitive. Consider the case where we are designing an algorithm to identify some outlier - say credit card fraud as an example. Assume I design an algorithm and it is 99.99 % accurate.
Sounds impressive?
That is until …