John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Center for Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies Prepared to accompany cityLIVE! "everything einstein" November 15, 2007, 6:30 pm The New Hazlett Theater…
If you’re looking for a nice dose of crypto conspiracy theorizing and want to read a paper by some very knowledgeable cryptographers, I have just the paper for you. Titled “A Riddle Wrapped in an E…
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
It is the intelligent analysis of information that would be critical in a decade from now.
Scientific American writes about rescuing the enormous theorem (classification of finite simple groups) before the proof vanishes. How can...
Find Bayes' Theorem confusing? Let's break down this famous formula using Lego to help you build up a better intuition for this foundational concept!
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
Update (Dec. 14): The long wait is over! Here’s Laci’s paper on the arXiv. So far, I’ve read it only deeply enough to note that it contains the following sentence: A group G ≤ S…
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
In the previous post , we have seen how elliptic curves over the real numbers can be used to define a group. Specifically, we have defined a rule for point addition : given three aligned points, their sum is zero ($P + Q + R = 0$). We have derived a geometric method and an algebraic method for computing point…
Transcript of Stephen Wolfram's talk at SXSW 2015 on the present and future of computing: Wolfram Language, image recognition, language-design philosophy, tweetable programs, computational thinking for kids, natural language as input, symbolic programming, deployment, automation of programming, Internet of Things…
If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a diagram of an array, the array indices, and the array elements, odds are good you’d produce a diagram something like this: In this post, I want to persuade you to replace that image, or, at least, to augment it with an…
In fact, only of the lower house, the Sejm. During its current term, 460 deputies voted 5545 times since the 8th of November 2011. The Sejm website publishes the individual results of the votes as …
The article here sums up pretty well the debacle that North American tournament Scrabble players have been faced with since the…
History of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s lost notebooks and an exploration of solutions to those equations using Mathematica.
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
MIT graduate students have developed a new “cutting-plane” algorithm, a general-purpose algorithm for solving optimization problems. They’ve also developed a new way to apply their algorithm to specific problems, yielding orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains.
A good colleague of mine, Rich Geldreich put up a interesting article talking about his viewpoints in future directions in lossless…
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neural networks , deep learning , representations , NLP , recursive neural networks
Deep Learning is amazing. But why is Deep Learning so successful? Is Deep Learning just old-school Neural Networks on modern hardware? Is it just that we have so much data now the methods work b…
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
True story: it’s possible to fly through your own secondary math education — honor roll bumper sticker on your mom’s minivan and all —Â but miss some of the Very Big Ideas of secondary …
A while back, John Regehr posted the Nibble Sort Programming Contest on his blog. The objective was to write a program that sorts the 4-bit components (nibbles) of 64-bit words as fast as possible. For example, 0x42badc0ffeed00d5 should result in 0xffeedddcba542000 after sorting.
Interesting applied project for your students , or as a warning for decisions under uncertainty / statistical significance. Real money on the line so the length of time and number of entries required to get a winner may be an interesting dataset after this is all done.
