2101
Why squared error? (2014)
its computational convenience • connections to the Gaussian distribution • differentiability and basis independence • why not squared error • absolute-error methods
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
2102
Statistical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
You can get CS papers published with shoddy statistics, but that doesn’t mean you should. Here are three easy ways to bungle the data analysis in your evaluation section: don’t even try to use statistics when you really ought to; misinterpret an inconclusive statistical test as concluding a negative; or run too many…
2103
Inspecting C's qsort Through Animation
The C standard library includes a qsort() function for sorting arbitrary buffers given a comparator function. The name comes from its original Unix implementation, “quicker sort,” a variation of the well-known quicksort algorithm. The C standard doesn’t specify an algorithm, except to say that it may be unstable (C99…
2104
4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
Might not be the most reliable or useful contraption but it's definitely a fun one.
2105
Spikey Spheres
A word of warning ... I'm presenting here something called an analogy. It's not perfect, it has problems, it's not exact, but there are ways in which it can aid your thinking. I'm giving a way of visualising high-dimensional spheres, a way that has its limitations, but which can help avoid making mistakes based on…
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2107
Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math?
I recently attended the Heidelberg Laureate Forum , in which some older researchers--mainly Fields Medalists and Turing Award winners--talked to and with young researchers. The young researchers ranged from a few students just entering university to young faculty members, most being graduate students. They came from…
2108
Zero-allocation Trie Traversal
As part of a demonstration in an upcoming article , I wrote a simple trie implementation. A trie is a search tree where the keys are a sequence of symbols (i.e. strings). Strings with a common prefix share an initial path down the trie, and the keys themselves are stored implicitly by the structure of the trie. It’s…
2109
Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
How Stephen Wolfram helped with the theory of interstellar travel, communication with aliens and questions from the actors in “Arrival”, the movie.
2110
Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles
Quote: Back in 80s, it was possible to calculate the speed of the program just by looking at assembly. Another Quote: keep in mind that these days compilers ...
2111
Dijkstra's Algorithm
I was at SCNA the other day, and someone approached me about TDD and Dijkstra’s algorithm. He wondered if you could find a sequence of tests that would lead you to the algorithm. This sounded like a fun little exercise, so I decided to give it a try here.
2112
Fast Fibonacci Algorithms (2015)
Definition: The Fibonacci sequence is defined as \(F(0) = 0\), \(F(1) = 1\), and \(F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2)\) for \(n ≥ 2\). So the sequence (starting with \(F(0)\)) is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ….
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2114
Towards deep symbolic reinforcement learning
Towards deep symbolic reinforcement learning Garnelo et al, 2016 Every now and then I read a paper that makes a really strong connection with me, one where I can’t stop thinking about the imp…
2115
A Natural Law for Rotating Galaxies: What Does This Mean for Dark Matter?
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
2116
Image unshredder by simulated annealing (2015)
On another page , I unleash the simulated annealing algorithm on a toy problem. It generates an image full of random colorful pixels, and rearranges the pixels so that similar colors are near each other.
2117
How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians? (2012)
Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Education, has expressed a wish to see almost all school pupils studying mathematics in one form or another up to the age of 18. An obvious quest…
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2119
Computing primes with CSS
I’ve been working on a redesign of this site, so doing more CSS, finally internalizing Sass, etc. During my reading, the nth-child pseudo-class caught my eye.
2120
The 280-Year-Old Algorithm Inside Google Trips
Posted by Bogdan Arsintescu, Software Engineer & Sreenivas Gollapudi, Kostas Kollias, Tamas Sarlos and Andrew Tomkins, Research ScientistsAlgor...
2121
The Math Inside the US Highway System
At first glance, the US highway seems like a jumble of roads: However, the numbers follow a grid, with rules nobody told me (image source, click to enlarge):
2122
Music theory for nerds
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
2123
Logical Induction
MIRI is releasing a paper introducing a new model of deductively limited reasoning: “Logical induction,” authored by Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen,
2124
Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime
Join Illya Gerasymchuk on his new blog as he explores blockchain, DeFi, Zero-Knowledge cryptography, AI, and finance.
2125
How Quaternions encode rotations: derivation and sample code
In the post on matrices in Codea I mentionned that an affine transformation (things like rotation, scaling, translation) ℝ 3 → ℝ 3 could be specified by giving four vectors. In this post I want to examine that a little more closely for the special case of a rotation. That is to say: how can I encode a rotation in ℝ 3…
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2127
Introduction to Mean Shift Algorithm
Its been quite some time since I wrote a Data Mining post . Today, I intend to post on Mean Shift – a really cool but not very well known algorithm. The basic idea is quite simple but the results a…
2128
A new algorithm for smoother 360 video viewing
Visit the post for more.
2129
Some of the most important deep learning papers
Engineering at Forward | UCLA CS '19
2130
When Big O Fools You
Big O notation is a great tool. It allows one to quickly make smart choices among various data structures and algorithms. But sometimes a casualBig O analy...