GM produced a self-driving car prototype...in 1958. There's a short documentary about it. Required wires in the road rather than machine learning. Presumably their PR machine said, "They'll be commercially viable by 1959." … [Read more...]
Sentient AI
Gary Marcus addresses the nonsense in the popular press about Google's LaMDA AI system being sentient. He leads with a great quote, from Abeba Birhane, that sums up the whole thing. we have arrived at peak AI hype accompanied by minimal critical thinking … [Read more...]
Is functional programming more effective than object-orientated programming?
Imperative vs functional programming. It's a debate that goes back to the birth of high level languages---Fortran vs Lisp. In later years, it was retreaded as object-oriented vs function programming (OOP vs FP)---OOP having become the (massively) dominant software development paradigm. And, I'm a fully paid up member. I embraced Object Pascal via Delphi 1 on 1995 and have been on the train ever … [Read more...]
Assumptions can ruin your k-means clusters
Assumptions can ruin your k-means clusters Clustering is one of the most powerful and widely used of the machine learning techniques. It's very seductive. Throw some data into the algorithm and let it discover hitherto unknown relationships and patterns. k-means is the most popular of all the cluster algorithms. It's easy to understand---and therefore implement---so it's available in almost all … [Read more...]
The Forer effect
Psychologist Bertram Forer gave 39 of his students a personality test. Each was given a personalised profile based on their answers. Except they were all given the same profile...taken from an astrology book. When asked to assess how well it described them, on a 0-5 scale, the students reported an average of 4.3. Wikipedia describes the Forer effect as ...a common psychological phenomenon … [Read more...]