All that is under the Sun
Imagine you’re trying to teach a machine the difference between a cat and a dog. You show it a picture of a cat, and it says, with 90% confidence, “That’s a cat.” Great! Now you show it a dog, and it says, with 60% confidence, “That’s a cat.” Not so great. The second guess is …
Imagine you’re teaching an archery student. They loose an arrow, and it thuds into the target, a little off-center. You wouldn’t just say, “You missed.” To be a good teacher, you need to know how much they missed by. Was it a near-perfect shot, just a hair’s breadth from the bullseye? Or did it land …
In the real world, outcomes are rarely certain. Will it rain tomorrow? Will a stock price go up? Will a user click on an ad? Probability theory provides the mathematical framework for reasoning about uncertainty, and at the heart of this framework lies the concept of a probability distribution. A probability distribution is a fundamental …
“Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain.” – Santiago Ramón y Cajal Imagine you wake up one morning to find your coffee machine has grown extra buttons overnight, ready to prepare new exotic brews you didn’t even know existed. Far-fetched? For your kitchen appliances, certainly—but what if your …
Have you ever noticed how your brain effortlessly maps out the fastest route to work—or zeroes in on the murderer halfway through a mystery novel? That’s reasoning in action: the invisible yet powerful mental machinery we use to draw conclusions, make decisions, and understand the world. Now, imagine machines doing the same thing. In recent …
In Jane Austen’s Emma, the heroine finds herself suddenly alone after her close companion marries, left with “no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening” and only her kind but feeble father for company. Austen writes that Emma, “with all her advantages, natural and domestic, was now in great danger of suffering from …