From the Financial Times earlier this week.
I’m tempted to say that this blog is “powered by AI”. Except of course that it’s powered by, er, organic intelligence.
Category Archives: Asides
Famous Seamus and February 1st
Today is St Brigid’s Day, still celebrated in my native land. John Humphreys of Radio 4’s Today programme had a lovely interview with Seamus Heaney’s widow, Marie, and their daughter, Catherine.
Just before the end, Humphreys asks them to name their favourite poem from Heaney’s formidable oeuvre. Catherine chose ‘Postscript’, which also happens to be mine.
1993 joke v2.0
Card picked up at the 2019 Data Protection and Democracy conference in Brussels.
Paris in la Belle Époque
Extraordinary collection of high quality remastered prints from films made by the Lumière company in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896-1900. Slowed down footage to a natural rate and added in sound for ambiance. Gives on an extraordinary feel life on the streets at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Feynman trap
Gary Smith, writing in Wired:
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once asked his Caltech students to calculate the probability that, if he walked outside the classroom, the first car in the parking lot would have a specific license plate, say 6ZNA74. Assuming every number and letter are equally likely and determined independently, the students estimated the probability to be less than 1 in 17 million. When the students finished their calculations, Feynman revealed that the correct probability was 1: He had seen this license plate on his way into class. Something extremely unlikely is not unlikely at all if it has already happened.
The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.
Lots of other examples.
The moral? “Good research begins with a clear idea of what one is looking for and expects to find. Data mining just looks for patterns and inevitably finds some.”
Crow-sourced problem-solving
We all knew that crows are intelligent and resourceful creatures, but this new research with New Caledonian crows really takes the biscuit:
The new study, published today in Scientific Reports, shows that these birds can create long-reaching tools out of short combinable parts – an astonishing mental feat. Assemblage of different components into novel functional and manoeuvrable tools has, until now, only been observed in apes, and anthropologists regard early human compound tool manufacture as a significant step in brain evolution. Children take several years before creating novel tools, probably because it requires anticipating properties of as yet unseen objects. Such anticipation, or planning, is usually interpreted as involving creative mental modelling and executive functions.
The study demonstrates that this species of crow possesses highly flexible abilities that allow them to solve complex problems involving anticipation of the properties of objects they have never seen.
The link contains some amazing (but poorly-lit) videos.
What scientists searched for most on Scopus last year
Source: Nature
The smartphone plateau
As the Economist notes “the recent slowing of smartphone sales is bad news for the industry, obviously. But for the rest of humanity it is a welcome sign that a transformative technology has become almost universal”.
Er, up to a point, Lord Copper.
Links for today
Four remarkable articles.
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Ron Deibert: “Three Painful Truths About Social Media”, Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2019. link – lovely, synoptic summary of our current reality, by a scholar who seem more of the dark underbelly of our networked world than most of us.
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Paul Nemitz, “Constitutional democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 15 October 2018, p376. link. Magnificent essay by the Principal Adviser to the European Commission on why judgements about ethical AI cannot be left to the tech companies.
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David Silver et al, “A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1140-1144, 07 Dec 2018 link. The full scientific report by DeepMind researchers on their ALphaZero machine, which taught itself to acquire superhuman capabilities in playing certain games.
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Gary Kasparov, “Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1087, 07 Dec 2018. Lovely commentary by a former Grandmaster on AlphaZero’s accomplishments.
The importance of accountancy
