Fun Stuff

A few insignificant thoughts and a few stolen ideas for the idle website surfer

Quotes

Yes, I’m a learning geek…

In the end, the real representation learned was the friends we fine-tuned along the way. J.A

“Simple baseline” means six months of engineering. J.A

Pertinence Barbillon a été primesque comme tous les jeudis I. S. à propos de P. B. (taken from Louis’s Home Page)

AI Goodfathers Facts

A compilation of my favorites taken from Reddit logs and from Yann Lecun’s Home Page

• Geoff Hinton doesn’t need to make hidden units. They hide by themselves when he approaches (from Yann Lecun).
• Geoff Hinton’s generalizations are boundless (from Yann Lecun).
• I’m not going to talk about philosophical things or why I stopped coming to AAAI or anything like that (Geoff at AAAI 2020).
• Schmidhuber was robbed.
• Schmidhuber did it first.
• Before publishing a paper, researchers ask whether Jürgen already thought of it in 1991.
• Jürgen’s literature reviews begin before the literature.
• Ilya’s toy models require national infrastructure.

Miscellaneus

It is traditional for the author to magnanimously accept the blame for whatever deficiencies remain. I don’t. Any errors, deficiencies, or problems in this book are somebody else’s fault, but I would appreciate knowing about them so as to determine who is to blame. Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual (1997)

An algorithm is an explicit, precise, unambiguous, mechanically-executable sequence of elementary instructions, usually intended to accomplish a specific purpose. For example, here is an algorithm for singing that annoying song “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”, for arbitrary values of 99:

BottlesOfBeer(n):
    For i ← n down to 1
        SING "i bottles of beer on the wall, {i} bottles of beer,"
        SING “Take one down, pass it around, {i - 1} bottles of beer on the wall."
    SING "No bottles of beer on the wall, no bottles of beer,”
    SING "Go to the store, buy some more, {n} bottles of beer on the wall."

Jeff Erickson, Algorithms (2019)