Aug. 31, 2023

Aug. 01, 2023

Book Review: Mindstorms

Mindstorms - children, computers and powerful ideas

Mindstorms is a book by Seymour Papert that was first published in 1980. Seymour Papert is the inventor of the LOGO programming language, and the book lays down the motivation for creating LOGO as a teaching aid for children.

When we talk about teaching aid, we probably conjure up something …

Jun. 16, 2023

Monads in Functional Programming

The idea of doing a computation within a special context isn't unique to quantum computing. Functional programming has a concept called the monad that does something similar. This is how it works: you have an input value and you want to perform a sequence of calculations within a certain special …

Jun. 15, 2023

Physical Representation of Quantum Computer

Even in quantum computers, many calculations are done using traditional circuits. What usually happens is that a bunch of calculations are done using traditional microprocessors and then there will be some hard algorithm that needs to run, things like prime factorisation or brute force search. There are the algorithms that …

Jun. 14, 2023

Why not both?

"You can have a chocolate or ice cream. Which do you want?"

I posed this question to my son. To nobody's surprise, he rejected the choice and answered "Both". Repeating that he should only choose one of the options were in vain. What he knew very well was that the …

Jun. 13, 2023

Jun. 12, 2023

The Concept of Superposition

We have been talking the last few days about ChatGPT. One of the interesting things about a deep learning AI system is how it 'stores' knowledge.

In traditional computing systems, we can point to part on the storage device and say "these bytes are stored here" and "these other bytes …

Jun. 11, 2023

Ninety-Nine Heads

On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:

You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?

If you ask a normal …

Jun. 10, 2023

Jun. 09, 2023

Probability Space vs Consequence Space

Since I have been writing about unexpected statistical outcomes due to skews in the dataset, I thought I'd take a look at Nassim Taleb's twitter to see what he has been tweeting about. I came across this tweet

Taleb tweet on ChatGPT

This is quite an interesting tweet. Taleb mentions two terms: Probability space …