All that is under the Sun
Imagine you’ve built an AI model to sort fruit. After training, you test it on 100 pieces of fruit (80 apples and 20 oranges). The model correctly identifies 85 of them. Is it a good model? Your first instinct might be to say it’s “85% accurate,” and therefore pretty good. But what if I told …
The Art of Choosing One From Many: Categorical Cross-Entropy and the AI’s Grand Decision Imagine you’re a librarian training a new assistant. This isn’t just any library; it has 50,000 different sections. You hand the assistant a book and ask, “Where does this go?” The assistant, being new, doesn’t just point to one section. Instead, …
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 …