January 2012
1 post
6 tags
Professor Sebastian Thrun quits Stanford to teach...
The text of his homepage today:
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” to the world online, free of charge. We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of...
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
Kill hashtables, get shorter code
Driving late at night two months ago I wondered, why do we return hashtables from functions? Isn’t a hashtable like a function? Instead of calling some function to get a hashtable, then looking up values on that hashtable with keys, why not simply call the function directly each time I want a value? Just make the ‘key’ the last argument of the new function. So I tried it on...
June 2010
1 post
5 tags
Cluster (with Clojure)
I was watching a video of Berkeley professor Michael Jordan lecturing on the Chinese Restaurant process and for a moment he showed a slide of a tree of documents that were matched up by word frequencies. It seemed cool so I coded up my own version of it, mostly to learn about the topic and to get some practice with Clojure. It turned out there’s a name for this: hierarchical clustering....
January 2010
1 post
4 tags
Math question
Question: Can an edge of a hypergraph connect to some node more than once in some definition of a graph? If so you could represent a text, for example a book, as a single directed hyperedge running through a graph of words. EDIT: Probably not. If you could you’d lose lots of the useful properties of graphs, I think.
My other blog is a Posterous
My non-programming blog is here: http://herdrick.posterous.com/