Notes from a guest lecture at RMIT Episteme and Techne The story goes that a mathematition and his wife were trying to get a sofa to fit through a door, but with little success. “Ah!” the mathematician says with a flash of insight, I can prove this is not possible. And runs away to write down the details. When he returns to tell his wife about his impossibility proof, she has already got the sofa…
Two giants of AI, Rich Sutton and Rodney Brookes, have recently written essays ostensibly presenting two opposing viewpoints for the future of AI research. I highly recommend reading A Bitter Lesson and the follow up A Better Lesson . Both authors pride themselves on elegant brevity, which is admirable. But both viewpoints are so rich they really need further elaboration. So this attempt at…
For a recent project (that I’ll be writing more about in the future) I needed to be able to generate permutations efficiently; this got me reading about combinatorial number systems which provide the mathematical tools for doing various clever things with combinations. On the Wikipedia page for combinatorial number systems I stumbled across Gosper’s hack which is a great little bit of code for…
I’ve going to be posting more regularly, hopefully every month or so.