A discussion over at God Plays Dice had me nodding in agreement: proving a theorem is like playing an adventure game. As Isabel puts it
You are in a maze of twisty little equations, all alike
alluding to a particularly fiendish puzzle in the text adventure Colossal Cave.
Having recently grappled with some tricky proofs I [...]
In keeping with the “Anti-” theme from my last post I thought I’d share something I found in the treasure trove of rants that J. Michael Steele’s has put on the web for our edification.
Antihubrisines, according to John W. Tukey in his 1986 paper, Sunset Salvo, are little pearls of wisdom to keep in mind [...]
Last week I saw an interesting PhD monitoring presentation by Justin Bedo on the counter-intuitive phenomenon of “anti-learning”. For certain datasets, learning a classifier from a small number of samples and inverting its predictions performs much better than the original classifier. Most of the theoretical results Justin mentioned about are discussed in a recent paper and [...]