All that is under the Sun
Imagine you are the most intelligent person in the world. You have read every book, seen every movie, and studied every equation up until the year 2023. But today, you wake up with a strange condition: anterograde amnesia. You can hold a conversation, you can reason brilliantly using your vast library of knowledge, but you …
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 …
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Marcel Proust Memory. It shapes our identities, informs our decisions, and—if you believe the ancient Greeks—steers our destinies. Yet for all its importance, memory can be a fickle thing. We humans can remember a childhood phone number for decades, yet blank …
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 …