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Name: Lucas
Birthday: 7/8/1990
Gender: Male
Interests: I like reading, soccer, choir, Japanese, anime, manga, Aikido, Go, physics, philosophy, and writing. Although it would take a long time to do more than summarize my interests, the human search for meaning fascinates me more than sports, romance, popular culture, and the other areas that absorb most people's attention. What are the natural laws that govern the events of the world? If I could, I would answer that question.
Expertise: Step back from the ego and start thinking of ideas that apply to everyone.
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/6/2005
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| Once Chuang Chou dreamt that he was a
butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with
himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou.
Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang
Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt that he
was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between
Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is
called the Transformation of Things.
- Chuang Tzu, tr. Burton Watson | | |
| Ten Comments to Ten People
1-10:
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| Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
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| My computer science class is programming neural nets. Neural nets rely
on the basic theory that a "neuron" takes a certain number of inputs,
each with a weight attached to it, and crunches the sum of the
input-weight products through an activation function that produces an
output between 0 and 1. The activation function supposedly simulates
the synapsing of neurons, although physical neurons work on an
all-or-nothing basis rather than through logistic growth. By linking up
all the sensory inputs of a neural net to a layer of hidden neurons,
the program simulates the transmission of electronic information to the
brain. The hidden neurons then produce the inputs for a second layer of
neurons, which produce the final outputs of the neural net. These final
outputs can answer a variety of questions, such as whether three
numbers are sorted from least to greatest, and can even handle complex
problems such as face recognition.
All this sounds like jargon to the uninitiated - but worry not; stay
awhile and you shall comprehend. With that kind of system, you ask,
what kind of problem wouldn't
bow down before its awesome might? Well, I found one: the boolean AND
operator. AND follows simple rules: it takes two inputs, each
of which is either a 1 or a 0. If both inputs read 1, the operator
returns "true;" otherwise, it returns "false."
1, 1 --> 1
1, 0 --> 0
0, 1 --> 0
0, 0 --> 0
My neural Net, despite the fact that it could solve the intricacies of the
exclusive OR and recognize numbers in sorted order, utterly
failed to solve AND. There began my quest to conquer
this obstreperous operator. I spent an hour or so attempting to fix my tangled Net,
expecting to find an egregious mistake in my Code at every turn, but such a one never
surfaced. I called the King of the Nerds, David Keeler, asking him for
advice - but lo, the paltry AND felled his mighty neural Net as easily
as it had mine! Once my malicious foe had defeated even the King, I
resolved to go straight before the Emperor: the omniscient and
mysterious Andrew Merrill. Yet when I placed a phone call to his house,
his wife answered, telling me that this elusive Lord of Computer
Science had not yet finished his dinner. So there I waited, a humble
vassal hoping fervently for the cacophonous ring of the telephone, the
herald of the Emperor's endless technical wisdom.
I did cogitate long on this problem, but to no avail. The great Andrew
Merrill returned my call only to frighten me by revealing what I had
thought impossible: the divine leader ran his Program on AND, but it
too fell short! I might have perished at that moment, had I not
exhorted myself to show the fortitude befitting a Knight of the Code.
To my great relief and possibly to my salvation, however, Andrew
Merrill recovered, increasing the number of epochs in his program's
training, and by that virtue prevailing over the fearsome AND. Knowing
that the solution lay somewhere, but having little guide to its
whereabouts beyond the oracular revelations of the Emperor, I set my
sights towards finding my own solution.
My royal superior and fellow assignment-slayer of the Main-land,
Keeler, yet faltered in casting his neural Net over the indomitable
beast. Disheartened outwardly, but inwardly determined withal, I set
forth in new directions to determine another path. Increasing the
Learning Rate but morphed my Net the faster, into unwieldy and
grotesque shapes whose contours could never fit the sleek obsidian
scales of AND. Despairing, I allowed my Net more hidden nodes and more
epochs then it could possibly desire, until finally its gluttonous and
distorted form lay pathetically sprawled upon the blackening screen.
Taking defeat upon myself, I put down my command-line window and
sheathed my mouse, preferring to spend my last working moments on the
program in humble worship of the unfathomable nature of Java. Yet Java
still intended a purpose for me. I felt my hand rise to the Bar
of Tabs, and select my Net once more. In a flash the screen changed,
revealing a Method with the simple nomenclature "Initialize." In this
Function lay the genesis of the small random Weights that affected
every Input to the Program. The middle of this Function indicated the
small range to which these numbers were born: each one no more than a
positive 0.05, and no less than the negative of such. These poor
peasants, thought I, deserved more. Though I could do nothing for the
ineffable Zero preceding the decimal, I possessed the strength to
delete one other digit: to wipe away the second Zero, symbol of
nothing, oppressor of the Five. So I did, and as my last intended act
began the Method of the Main once more.
Fifty-two epochs later, my Program halted. A final test accuracy of 1.0
appeared in shimmering white on the command-line window. The very sight
stole all my breath but the small remainder I require to type these
words: because Andrew Merill, the Emperor Merrill, had taken one
thousand and eight hundred epochs to achieve the same task.
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| The worst flaw of structured education is that it teaches students to work for the sake of pleasing the teachers.
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