A dyslexic's take on code

I have written a few times on world generation [ 1 , 2 ]. A particular interest of mine is the ability to really use the infinite world that it is possible to create with algorithms to create something more than the imagination that is put into it. Ideas which generate something which is more than the sum of it’s parts are the holy grail of ideas. General relativity was this in physics, with relatively little experimental input, a huge amount of predictive power was created. This is the case for games where the terrain is generated procedurally. The developer of the game does not need to design each bit of the world for it to emerge as a huge, possibly infinite world. The problem with these worlds such as Minecraft is that although they are very large in size, they are limited in kind. Minecraft for example uses the concept of biomes. Each has to be developed and tested individually by the developers, making the systems take longer to build and all the surprises are manufactured. Th...

As a dyslexic, I rely heavily on spellcheck to correct my writing and put it into a readable form. I heavily rely on a similar checker when writing code, paying close attention to use before declaration errors that might indicate that I have misspelt something. I also have spellcheck on in vim, which checks snake case words individually! I don’t however have the same thing for mathematics. Notation can be incredibly powerful. The best notation is that where it makes it clear when you have done something wrong. Or better still doesn’t allow you to do anything wrong. When writing long equations I often miss a sign in one place or another, manipulate them wrong and generally propagate these errors until I find a result which doesn’t make sense. I wondered if there was something simple I could use, that would not be any more time consuming than writing the equations out by hand, that would act as a “spellcheck” for my manipulation of equations. I use a lot of equations on this blog and ...

How I tried to get my google assistant to remember things for me. I have recently bought a couple of google home devices for my flat and I find it really nice to be able to interact in a way that doesn’t require my eyes to be open. I find I use the one on my bedside table most, asking it to turn off the lights and play music before I go to sleep. This way I can control the music, volume and lighting while I’m dozing off to sleep. The most common question I ask it though is for the time. As strange as it sounds when every device has the time in one corner or another. If I look for the time on my phone, I am so often distracted by other notifications which end up in 5 minutes of being on my phone, one distraction after the next. At night the brightness of the screen is unpleasant. I don’t have too many smart devices besides the bedside lamps in the flat and so what would make the google home most useful for me would be to program my own little conversations with it. One simple one that I...

  Invariance, as opposed to inflammable, means, does not vary. The phrase “invariant in time” simply means “not changing over time”. Einsteins theory of relativity is all based on trying to create a consistent view of the world where certain things shouldn’t change depending on who is measuring them and how they are being measured. Invariance is important in artificial intelligence too. It’s incredibly important because if you can assume something won’t change, you don’t have to perform a calculation working out how it has changed. Take the simple example of newtons laws of motion, summarised in the formula: F=ma The power of this formula lies it its invariance. It doesn’t vary with the day of the week or time of day. It doesn’t vary with shape, with the type of object, with who is in government. It doesn’t vary with who is looking at it or where they are. Physics is assumed to be invariant with things such as the political persuasion of the observer but why can we make that assump...

What is intelligence? In artificial intelligence, there is a generally agreed-upon definition that intelligence is “The ability of an agent to correctly choose actions manipulating the world so as to achieve its terminal goal” . This definition is much easier to formalise and work towards than the more vague and anthropomorphic colloquial definition. That does mean that there are differences which might make the use of the term with this definition counterintuitive thinking in terms of the other. A common argument within my family is the question of if good recall constitutes intelligence (Not on its own according to this definition). An objection to this definition is that Donald Trump is considered intelligent, given his ability to take actions to achieve his goals (*Update post election, perhaps he is as lacking as he seems) . Other objections to this definition relate to how easier goals might make agents relatively more intelligent. Having an easier goal might make it seem that an...

Recent thoughts on the applicability of models made me think about if it was valid that we use a model of people’s height which gives a non-zero probability to a person with a negative height. Trying to calculate the probability of a man having a negative height has its challenges because most normal distribution tables don’t include such extreme Z numbers. I used the numbers for the average hight and standard deviation of a man from this site . We can convert our normal distribution to a Z score using the following formula: “Adult men in the United States are approximately normally distributed with a mean of 70 inches and a standard deviation of 3 inches.” As we are looking at a raw score of not negative x will be 0. Mu is 70 and sigma is 3. That gives us a Z score of about -23. Since most Z score tables don’t get even to 5 standard deviations from the mean, we will need to calculate being 23 out ourselves. With a little bit of help in finding out how to use scipy to do numeric inte...

My thinking here is that although transcendental equations don’t have algebraic answers are there still links between them? That theory is supported by the contour lines in the following  So I wasn’t going to look into this but sometimes I just get captured by the mathematics. I have known for a while that most equations can’t be solved. The unsolvability of most equations leads to transcendental numbers. Numbers which aren’t the result of a solvable algebraic equation like 5x+1=7 or 2x^2=3 but can be computed, at least approximately. These numbers include pi and e. There isn’t a formula for pi or e, we can define them, we can even define them without the use of geometry. As I have found out in my curious investigations both numbers seem to crop up only when calculus is involved. e is the solution to the problem of The functions that produce these two have always seemed arbitrary to me. Why is it the case that when we don’t know the answer to we just say, the answer is the answer?...