Thoughts on data science, statistics and machine learning.
Notes on Fred Brooks's 'No Silver Bullet'
I had a simple problem. An OCR engine found text anywhere on a PDF page. A separate parser could tell me whether a rectangle on that page contained text, an image, both, or neither. Given a piece of OCR output, I needed to decide whether it came from a text layer or from pixels that merely looked like text. When neither answer was reliable, the system would say “unknown”.
The problem was easy to state, easy to understand and easy to test. So why did it take me hours?
Finding Nash Equilibria in Jeopardy!
Spoiler Alert: It’s unusual for post about a game show like Jeopardy! to have a spoiler, but if you are a die hard fan of the show and haven’t seen the second semifinal game of season 2 of Pop Culture Jeopardy! (it’s on Netflix), then don’t read this just yet.
(Here on I’m just going to write Jeopardy without the exclamation mark, for convenience.)
The last round in a game of Jeopardy is called “Final Jeopardy”. When the round begins, the three contestants (individually, usually, but in the case of Pop Culture Jeopardy, teams of two) are shown the category of the final clue.
Resting on Your Laurels
He was short and chubby, only 13 or 14 years old. He was preparing tandoori rotis. He’d tear a handful of flour from a large white mass in front of him, and start rolling and pressing it between his palms. After a few seconds of rhythmic kneading, he’d slap the ball of dough on a pan. Then he’d press it flat with his knuckles, roll it up, knead it some more and slap it down again. After doing this a few times, he would put the roti on a cloth pad and stick it to the inside of the tandoor.
Remembering Peru
Knowing as I arrived that this would be the last time I would see her, I had reminded myself that a dying Carmen Callil was still more Carmen Callil than she was dying.
—Julian Barnes, Departure(s)
It is tempting to interpret this deceptively simple sentence as a description of a good death. If dying does not erode your identity, it is perhaps a good death. Barnes’ last (i.e. his latest, and also literally his last) novel constantly circles the themes of identity, memory and death. He keeps saying that memory is identity. And, as with Carmen Callil, he also seems to claim a small victory over death on her behalf—as long as people remember her for who she really was.