Joshua Cole's personal website. Writing on game theory, information theory, software engineering, and machine learning.
There’s a genre of internet atheist who thinks “regret your sins” is the dumbest possible advice a religion could give. Low-IQ cope for people who can’t face reality. Superstitious nonsense for the credulous. Surely no intelligent person would organize their moral life around the concept of regretting what they did wrong . Let’s check the math. sin(t) The function sin(t) oscillates. It swings…
The omnipotence paradox is a type error. It evaluates God as a child process instead of the parent. Fork, diverge, merge: the rock was both too heavy to lift and was lifted.
Entropy as the expected question-depth in the race from uncertainty to certainty.
Bridging game-graph abstraction with familiar graph-coloring ideas, with practical notes for large, partially known graphs.
N-pointer problems are frontier search in disguise. Refactoring reveals explicable properties that enable better testing and code reuse.
Applying Huffman coding to game tree action sequences. Entropy sets the floor, skewed action distributions make the payoff immediate.
The problem of evil assumes an omniscient evaluator and a limited observer produce identical judgments. A simulation shows why that assumption fails with even one extra unit of information.
Virtuous cycles compound improvement across iterations. Recognizing them changes predictions about feasibility and sustains motivation through early failure.
A review of the Bullet Journal method and Zettelkasten through the lens of database design: logs, graph structures, and query-time value.
Technical debt and best practices are the same thing -- an effort scalar with an acquisition cost. A model and visualization showing why short projects and long projects produce opposite conclusions.