News and notes

I wonder about using "failscene" to describe the currently-popular slate of AI tools and demos. In contrast with the demoscene::https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene, which is about getting very low powered computers to do cool things you wouldn...

In the flurry of text that text-generating large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have induced people to generate, a number of analogies have arisen to help make sense of what exactly these things do. Like most metaphors, some work better than others and...

Earlier today I noticed a survey on LinkedIn about whether a significant journal in my field should list ChatGPT as coauthor on articles. The survey creator asked us to answer and provide our rationale as a comment. If you don’t know what ChatGPT is, great...

Last July I taught a seminar I called Chaos Theory Chaos Practice as part of the Tufts Summer Accelerator program for high school students. I thought it went pretty well overall; I put a short writeup in the note Chaos managed. I will be teaching the same ...

The Chaos Theory Chaos Practice class ended last Thursday. There were 6 great students, all of whom were very engaged, asked lots of questions, and shared interesting ideas and tinkering. Several of the students pointed out they liked the simulators I coll...

Since it’s a thing I just figured out how to do and anticipate having to do again some day, here’s one way to convert a reveal.js presentation to MS PowerPoint format using LibreOffice. revealjs → PDF Visit https://yourdomain/yourpresentation/?print-pdf i...

I will be teaching a seminar called Chaos Theory, Chaos Practice as part of the Tufts Summer Accelerator program for high school students from July 10, 2022 to July 22, 2022. Here's the blurb I wrote for it: "Chaos", as a mathematical term...

A subclass of solution concepts arising in the theory of coevolutionary algorithms. There are technical definitions, and I'll add my own below, but the gist is that with a monotonic solution concept, as information increases, one never "flip flops&...

There is a lot to say about these, but primarily I am coming from the perspective of coevolutionary algorithms theory, where the notion is meant to be "arg min for interactive domains". Below are some details. First, a punchline: coevolutionary a...

Refers to the general idea that for a fixed class of problems, there can be coevolutionary algorithms that perform better than others on all instances of that class. It is an extension of a series of no free lunch theorems initiated by David Wolpert and Wil...

A part of complexity science that deals directly with nature-inspired evolutionary processes involving interaction in the fitness function. A definition I've used in the past is that these algorithms involve an evolutionary dynamics in which one or more...

A collection of one or more functions, called metrics, of the form $p\colon X_1\times X_2\times\cdots\times X_n\rightarrow R$, where each $i$ with $1\leq i\leq n$ is a domain role an element $x\in X_i$ is an entity (playing the domain role $i$) a tup...

A startup company I co-founded in 2016 while I was consulting between jobs. We explored using natural language processing techniques on US patent grants and Pubmed articles and built a couple prototype products around this technology. We made heavy use of E...

The primary goal of this set of modules is taking text processing capabilities up one level of abstraction. Many of the items listed below already exist as freely-available libraries. These libraries are fairly low-level, though, and successful use of them ...