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This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. Update 2017-01-09: Laci claims to have found a workaround to the previously posted error, and the claim is again quasipolynoimal time! Updated arXiv paper to follow. Update 2017-01-04: Laci has posted an update on his paper. The short version is that one small step

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. There’s a well-understood phenomenon in machine learning called overfitting. The idea is best shown by a graph: overfittingLet me explain. The vertical axis represents the error of a hypothesis. The horizontal axis represents the complexity of the hypothesis. The bl

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Mon

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. The Mona LisaLeonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings of all time. And there has always been a discussion around her enigmatic smile. He used a trademark Renaissance technique called sfumato, which involves many thin layers of glaze mixed wi

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. Here’s a simple puzzle with a neat story. A rich old woman is drafting her will and wants to distribute her expansive estate equally amongst her five children. But her children are very greedy, and the woman knows that if he leaves her will unprotected her children

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. startupsThe software world is always atwitter with predictions on the next big piece of technology. And a lot of chatter focuses on what venture capitalists express interest in. As an investor, how do you pick a good company to invest in? Do you notice quirky names

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. Update: the mistakes made in the code posted here are fixed and explained in a subsequent post (one minor code bug was fixed here, and a less minor conceptual bug is fixed in the linked post). In our last post in this series on topology, we defined the homology grou

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. Dear reader, this post has an interactive simulation! We encourage you to play with it as you read the article below. In our series of posts on cellular automata, we explored Conway’s classic Game of Life and discovered some interesting patterns therein. And then in

This article was ported from my old Wordpress blog here, If you see any issues with the rendering or layout, please send me an email. For those who aren’t regular readers: as a followup to this post, there are four posts detailing the basic four methods of proof, with intentions to detail some more advanced proof techniques in the future. You can find them on this blog’s primers page. Do you reall