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The man with the Y Combinator tattoo

scienceblogs.com

26 pointsby norvigvor 19 Jahren17 comments

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vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Larry Wall is Brat.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Thank you for archiving!

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

I had "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" as a child. I don't think it had a direct influence on my career in AI, but when I had a college job as a computer help desk consultant, I would keep it on my desk, and when a student would ask "This is a really strange question, but ..." and I had heard the same thing multiple times before, I would respond "Hmm, let me consult a reference manual", flip through "Danny" for a bit, and then give the answer that I already knew.

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

"Joins Stanford HAI" is correct; "Leaves Google" is not right–I'm keeping my Google badge, but will spend most of my time at Stanford.

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I ran Search for 5 years or so; then ran all of Research for the next 5; then had an increasing smaller portion of a huge growing Research initiative. This past year I enjoyed mentoring startups in ML through the Google for Startups program. But m0gz got it pretty much right.

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I use "Ali" and "Bo", because they are (a) gender-neutral, (b) less Western, and (c) prefixes of "Alice" and "Bob".

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I agree, tuvistavie! But my default machine has 3.7 installed, and I didn't want to get too far ahead of readers. Sometime next year I'll go to 3.8, and look forward to using ":="

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

madhadron, I'm a Common Lisper, so I'm good with `first` and `rest`.

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

Good point, dmurray. It was a subtle point here, and probably I should have commented on it.

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I regret causing confusion here. It turns out that this correlation was true on the initial small data set, but after gathering more data, the correlation went away. So the real lesson should be: "if you gather data on a lot of low-frequency events, some of them will display a spurious correlation, about which you can make up a story."

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Very nice, David and William.

I was also able to get to about a 2 second solution, but I didn't have to do bit operations: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/norvig/pytudes/blob/mast...

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I admire Oren, and AI2, and the other institutes mentioned in the Director's Statement. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

The diversity numbers are accurate. The numbers are for employees; some of the images depict non-employee visitors, some of whom are people of non-yellow color.

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Some points:

- Yes, the original publication year was 2000. I've added that to the file.

- @HelloNurse: You've got the key point. I provided Lisp code to teach AI; but my goal was to teach AI, not Lisp. As more schools and students were familiar with Python and not with Lisp, I needed to make the switch to keep teaching AI effectively.

- @jonathanstrange: Yes, "batteries included" is key to Python; there is some pain in doing any change; this page attempted to alleviate some of the pain.

- @rauhl: "in the silence a thousand words were said". I'm not sure what words are in that silence. But to me, the words are: Lisp and Python are different ecosystems with different customs. The Lisp community likes to solve lots of problems with macros. The Python community doesn't. For 95% of the usages, neither approach is better than the other, they are just different. For example, in Python, `with` is a statement, and you define custom classes for each usage you think of. In Lisp, you define a macro like `with-open-file` for each usage. The end result in usability and efficiency is similar. In Lisp, you often define macros for custom data types, e.g.

    (def-tree T1
        root (A B C)
        A (D E)
        B (E F)
        ...)

In Python you use a combination of built-in data types (like dicts), custom classes, and ad-hoc parsers of text. Again, the approach is different, but readability and efficiency is similar.

It is certainly true that if you want to define, say, a mock Prolog system, it is easier to do it in Lisp with macros than in Python, where you would need to deal with the far messier `ast.parse` module. Is that where the silent words were? For me the words would be "Lisp is a much better choice if your primary goal is defining a full-blown domain specific language. For most other programming tasks, the two languages offer similar functionality in different way."

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Here's a good summary bu Yonatan Zunger: https://healthcareinamerica.us/how-to-ask-good-questions-abo...

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Good summary. If I were in charge, I wouldn't even have a notion of unconditional probability -- everything is conditional on something.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

You're right! 2.4 was out when I wrote that, so I could/should have used dequeue. But I wanted to use things that I thought readers would be familiar with, and timing wasn't a big issue.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

When you say "1) Potential Outcome 1: Both are boys 2) Potential Outcome 2: One boy and one girl 3) Potential outcome 3: Both are girls" you are right that those are three potential outcomes, but they are not equiprobable outcomes. One boy and one girl is twice as probable each of the others.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Very nice write-up on SET, Henrik. I hadn'e seen it before, and wasn't aware of your interesting results.