The World and Beliefs

The world with its quarks and chromosomes, its distant lands and spiral nebulae, is like a vast computer in a black box, forever sealed except for its input and output registers. These we directly observe, and in the light of them we speculate on the structure of the machine, the universe. Thus it is that we think up the quarks and chromosomes, the distant lands and the nebulae; they would account for the observable data. When an observation turns out unexpectedly, we may try modifying our th...

 Input and Output Randomness

The fundamental difference between randomness that support strategy and randomness that under cuts strategy, input randomness allows the player to build the strategy output randomness undercuts it and limits your ability to plan ahead. For example let's look at Pandemic this is a great example of input randomness flicking the cards is certainly random, create a situation that the players need to react to that reaction is completely deterministic. If for example you have to roll dies if you re...

 Perceptrons and Sigmoid Neurons

A way you can think about the perceptron is that it's a device that makes decisions by weighing up evidence. Let me give an example. It's not a very realistic example, but it's easy to understand, and we'll soon get to more realistic examples. Suppose the weekend is coming up, and you've heard that there's going to be a cheese festival in your city. You like cheese, and are trying to decide whether or not to go to the festival. You might make your decision by weighing up three factors: 1. Is...

 The World is a Black Box

The world with its quarks and chromosomes, its distant lands and spiral nebulae, is like a vast computer in a black box, forever sealed except for its input and output registers. These we directly observe, and in the light of them we speculate on the structure of the machine, the universe. Thus it is that we think up the quarks and chromosomes, the distant lands and the nebulae; they would account for the observable data. When an observation turns out unexpectedly, we may try modifying our th...