It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004) • Hacker News Board

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#41

Post by dvirsky » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

chestervonwinch wrote: post #31

lucb1e wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it wouldn't look as "scientific" (i.e. anyone could understand it, it wouldn't look complicated). At least that's what I feel like, reading and writing a bunch of papers for my master's. We are encouraged to put math stuff in ours just because it looks more theoretical that way. Whenever I do something of worth I also make sure to blog about it so I can write down in normal terms what we did and found, with…

1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α). 2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translati…

Is there a standard notation that can produce both? I don't know much LaTex but I don't think it holds sufficient information. Does MathML maybe?

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#42

Post by slavik81 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

chestervonwinch wrote: post #31

lucb1e wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it wouldn't look as "scientific" (i.e. anyone could understand it, it wouldn't look complicated). At least that's what I feel like, reading and writing a bunch of papers for my master's. We are encouraged to put math stuff in ours just because it looks more theoretical that way. Whenever I do something of worth I also make sure to blog about it so I can write down in normal terms what we did and found, with…

1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α). 2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translati…

Just the other day I spent a solid 30 minutes trying to distinguish between I and Iⱼ in an equation of motion. Turns out that the former was the identity matrix and the later was the inertial matrix of body j.

If there's a way to add that sort of hover annotation in LaTeX, I'd gladly use that for my thesis.

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#43

Post by goialoq » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #8

Does a Raspberry Pi have enough computing power to run these two neurons in the real world? Could I attach motors and sensors to a real bike and have it drive itself? That would be amazing.

No, because the model described in the paper only works for an extremely simplified toy simulation of a bicycle, not a real bicycle riding on a real road that is not a spherical cow.

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#44

Post by jonbarker » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #12

I wish math notation becomes substitued with pseudocode. I can never figure out all the greek letters!

Or at least spell them out like lambda

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#45

Post by kbenson » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #12

I wish math notation becomes substitued with pseudocode. I can never figure out all the greek letters!

Then we would just have a bunch of mathematicians wondering what some of the function names meant, since English isn't always definitive of obvious in definition (not to mention the non-English speakers who have to learn a combination of symbols instead of one).

All you're really doing is substituting something you're unfamiliar (or less familiar) with, common mathematics symbols, with something you specifically happen to be more familiar with (programming pseudocode).

It's really no different than someone looking at your pseudocode and saying "why can't they just write it in plain English?"

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#46

Post by Zanta » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

pje wrote: post #39

This is now my favorite scientific paper headline, beating out the previous champion, "How Many Birds Are There?" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018341530497

On the subject of birds, "Great tits also have age-related defects"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110307130215.h...

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#47

Post by jahewson » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

dvirsky wrote: post #41

chestervonwinch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α). 2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translati…

Is there a standard notation that can produce both? I don't know much LaTex but I don't think it holds sufficient information. Does MathML maybe?

The MathML standard is split into two parts, Presentation MathML, which is widely used and contains roughly the same information as TeX, and Semantic MathML which is used by a handful of computer algebra systems. The latter does what you want.

Both formats have their origins in Wolfram Mathematica.

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#48

Post by my_ghola » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #45

chrischen wrote: post #12

I wish math notation becomes substitued with pseudocode. I can never figure out all the greek letters!

Then we would just have a bunch of mathematicians wondering what some of the function names meant, since English isn't always definitive of obvious in definition (not to mention the non-English speakers who have to learn a combination of symbols instead of one). All you're really doing is substituting something you're unfamiliar (or less familiar) with, common mathematics symbols, with something you specifically happ…

Then maybe something that can translate math notation to pseudocode and back?

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#49

Post by dahart » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #8

Does a Raspberry Pi have enough computing power to run these two neurons in the real world? Could I attach motors and sensors to a real bike and have it drive itself? That would be amazing.

Fun fact: PID controllers are embedded into the wiring of today's brushless hobby motors, the kind used for drones, for example. The last motor I dissected had a tiny little ATMEL 8-bit 1Mhz chip shrinkwrapped into the wires that controls the phase of the magnets that drive the motor, to make sure it matches the spin rate and make sure it doesn't skip or get out of phase. ATMEL published a whitepaper on the PID controller that says it runs the chip at around 10% load, meaning it could handle the PID calculations for 9 motors and still have some spare cycles.

A Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to run hundreds or thousands of PID controllers simultaneously, depending on your sample rate.

Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)

#50

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

chestervonwinch wrote: post #31

lucb1e wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it wouldn't look as "scientific" (i.e. anyone could understand it, it wouldn't look complicated). At least that's what I feel like, reading and writing a bunch of papers for my master's. We are encouraged to put math stuff in ours just because it looks more theoretical that way. Whenever I do something of worth I also make sure to blog about it so I can write down in normal terms what we did and found, with…

1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α). 2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translati…

> Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too verbose in mathematics

That is not obvious to me. Perhaps in a purely mathematical paper with dozens of formulas, but that's not my field of study. In any paper I read of any discipline, I never came across any paper filled with enough formulas that it would make sense to compress at the cost of clarity.

I fully agree, though, on following conventions (that only conveys extra context) and using hover text to act as a quick lookup function. I actually looked for the latter in the past but couldn't find a way to do it in LaTeX.