Even with the birthday problem, sqrt(52!) is still about 10^34, which is still huge. It's unlikely that any two (sufficiently random) shuffles in history have been the same.
Or maybe it's just a good excuse to carry fewer cups and pitchers around?
You're right (and nitpicking nitpicks seems appropriate to me :P). But, I'm pretty sure the assumptions of logistic regression are even stronger than just that. The inputs are assumed to be independent given the output…
Still, in any consistent way of assigning probabilities to events, if A implies B, then P(A) <= P(B). Neural network outputs are not probabilities. I think that's the main lesson here.
I personally liked "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It's pretty old, but it's to-the-point and inexpensive.
Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise. I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1…
Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning…
> ... all possible combinations of 8-16 characters with 100 character possibilities ... Yes, but this doesn't even come close to describing the typical users' password, which is most likely a 6-letter English word with…
This should be marked (2004), not (2014).
There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
Kolmogorov complexity is definitely meaningful, but it's not (Shannon) entropy, just conceptually similar. Many people think of something like Kolmogorov-complex sequences when they think of "random" sequences, which is…
Right, the amount of entropy per bit of sequence is always between 0 (deterministic) and 1 (every bit is independent and 50/50) (... or between 0 and log2(k) in general if the element varies over a set of k things).…
That's because this result is not about combining weak deterministic PRNGs, it's about combining entropy sources (like two hardware random number generators). This has always been possible, but it sounds like they've…
Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the latency to read data from another machine's memory across ethernet…
Sounds a lot like python's "pickle" module (which is super-useful for prototyping), but with the same achilles' heel: all of your serialized objects can now run arbitrary code when you deserialize them!
Of course, knowing that extremists are usually engineers only helps you if you have a known extremist and want to guess his profession. Extremists are a pretty small group, and engineers a much larger one, so I'd have…
I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever…
Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian",…
There are already multiple known molecular mechanisms for long-term memories though. One of the simplest is spike-timing-dependent plasticity [1], which is caused by the behavior of NMDA receptors shortly before and…
Not if we genetically engineer them to like it first!
I suspect that's an important part of why confident ignorance is seen as the "stupidest" trait. Being confident has social advantages, so without a significant risk of looking stupid for overlooking something, everyone…
You can convey some of that information to the compiler by using __builtin_unreachable(), e.g.: #define ASSUME(x) if(!(x))__builtin_unreachable() This is compiler-specific, of course, and introduces undefined behavior…
"If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what…
Cryptographic constructions using block ciphers generally rely on the block cipher never having the same input twice with the same key in order to satisfy security models. If you're feeding effectively random data into…
A "right answer between competing answers" just sounds like a high-entropy belief state over the correct action to take. This doesn't mean you're overanalyzing, it means you don't have enough information to be sure of…
Even with the birthday problem, sqrt(52!) is still about 10^34, which is still huge. It's unlikely that any two (sufficiently random) shuffles in history have been the same.
Or maybe it's just a good excuse to carry fewer cups and pitchers around?
You're right (and nitpicking nitpicks seems appropriate to me :P). But, I'm pretty sure the assumptions of logistic regression are even stronger than just that. The inputs are assumed to be independent given the output…
Still, in any consistent way of assigning probabilities to events, if A implies B, then P(A) <= P(B). Neural network outputs are not probabilities. I think that's the main lesson here.
I personally liked "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It's pretty old, but it's to-the-point and inexpensive.
Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise. I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1…
Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning…
> ... all possible combinations of 8-16 characters with 100 character possibilities ... Yes, but this doesn't even come close to describing the typical users' password, which is most likely a 6-letter English word with…
This should be marked (2004), not (2014).
There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
Kolmogorov complexity is definitely meaningful, but it's not (Shannon) entropy, just conceptually similar. Many people think of something like Kolmogorov-complex sequences when they think of "random" sequences, which is…
Right, the amount of entropy per bit of sequence is always between 0 (deterministic) and 1 (every bit is independent and 50/50) (... or between 0 and log2(k) in general if the element varies over a set of k things).…
That's because this result is not about combining weak deterministic PRNGs, it's about combining entropy sources (like two hardware random number generators). This has always been possible, but it sounds like they've…
Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the latency to read data from another machine's memory across ethernet…
Sounds a lot like python's "pickle" module (which is super-useful for prototyping), but with the same achilles' heel: all of your serialized objects can now run arbitrary code when you deserialize them!
Of course, knowing that extremists are usually engineers only helps you if you have a known extremist and want to guess his profession. Extremists are a pretty small group, and engineers a much larger one, so I'd have…
I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever…
Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian",…
There are already multiple known molecular mechanisms for long-term memories though. One of the simplest is spike-timing-dependent plasticity [1], which is caused by the behavior of NMDA receptors shortly before and…
Not if we genetically engineer them to like it first!
I suspect that's an important part of why confident ignorance is seen as the "stupidest" trait. Being confident has social advantages, so without a significant risk of looking stupid for overlooking something, everyone…
You can convey some of that information to the compiler by using __builtin_unreachable(), e.g.: #define ASSUME(x) if(!(x))__builtin_unreachable() This is compiler-specific, of course, and introduces undefined behavior…
"If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what…
Cryptographic constructions using block ciphers generally rely on the block cipher never having the same input twice with the same key in order to satisfy security models. If you're feeding effectively random data into…
A "right answer between competing answers" just sounds like a high-entropy belief state over the correct action to take. This doesn't mean you're overanalyzing, it means you don't have enough information to be sure of…