September 2017 Blogroll
A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind
Jennifer Ouellette, Quanta
Of course, I’m going to make a joke. While the claim of the research described in the article is that “localized episodes of disordered brain activity help keep the overall system in healthy balance”, I can’t help but wonder (in my own case) about the effects of widespread episodes of disordered brain activity. Ha.
I was interested to find that the phenomenon described, involving self-organizing criticality, has been applied in modeling blackouts in power grids (a subject near and dear to UVM). See: Noel, Brummitt, and D’Sousa, “Controlling Self-Organizing Dynamics on Networks Using Models that Self-Organize”, PRL 111, 078701 (2013); and Dobson, Carreras, Lynch and Newman, “Complex systems analysis of series of blackouts: Cascading failure, critical points, and self-organization” Chaos 17:2, 10.1063/1.2737822 (2007).
I will explore a little more to see if there are applications in machine learning.
What If Cantor’s Proof Is Wrong?
Dick Lipton, Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
I was led to this amusing article by reading another amusing paper published in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, entitled “An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers” (Hodges, BSL 4:1, March 1998). Hodges paper makes an account of various “refutations” of Cantor’s diagonal argument. Doing a little more poking around, I found Lipton’s article.
Lipton demonstrates some interesting results that would be valid if the reals were countable. The most straightforward of these (for me at least) is that if the reals were countable they would be well-ordered!
Audio Fingerprinting with Python and Numpy
Will Drevo, WD
Maybe I’ll use this in a little pet project I have going at home (machine learning to identify clusters and classify my music library accordingly), maybe not.