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What do numbers look like?

johnhw.github.io

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: What do numbers look like?

#41

If an artificial intelligence could open its pipes and vomit onto a newly-allocated two-dimensional array, I imagine its undigested bits would look very much like this.

This should be easily doable! Grab any model, pull off the output layer, run data through it to get a dataset of vector embeddings, and then run UMAP on it.

Re: What do numbers look like?

#43

Can someone explain to me like I am 5 ?

Convert numbers to a vector space represented by their prime factors: 2 => [1 0 0 0...] 3 => [0 1 0 0...] 4 => [1 0 0 0...] And map that high dimensional space back down to two dimensions (using some technique I haven't dug into yet). Colors are assigned by some scheme, later images help to illustrate how the particular clusterings happen like one where primes are rendered in white.

The UMAP and tSNE algorithms both use fancy math to find a 2-dimensional representation of the data that tries to preserve local structure as much as possible. So blobs in the original space should be represented as blobs in the reduced space, but the relative positions of any two blobs in the reduced space is not meaningful.

Re: What do numbers look like?

#44

According to Dmitry Kobak, some details in these figures are merely convergence artifacts, and no longer produced when using more recent versions of UMAP. https://twitter.com/hippopedoid/status/1318917878364672001?l...

I wonder if we can somehow figure out what those convergence artifacts actually were, and find a way to replicate them for cool digital art effects.

Re: What do numbers look like?

#46
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have to do with UMAP making dot products and assumptions about the inputs. If everything is 0s and 1s, the vectors will have a normal distribution of magnitudes (more or less). Otherwise the magnitudes will just explode and I don’t think UMAP will work.

It's also very common in general to use this "one-hot encoding" in statistics and machine learning. In many cases using all 2s or all -10s would produce the exact same result in theory, but with more work by the optimizing algorithm, possibly with adverse results as described above. It's easy to reason about mathematically, too. If the input vector is all 1s and 0s, it's easy to read off the result of multiplying tha…

That kind of sounds like normalisation in other contexts ("hey let's just say lightspeed is 1, simplifies the equations"), is that a fair analogy to make?

Re: What do numbers look like?

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, like the Mandelbrot set?

what are you trying to say?

The structures that emerge from a series of transformations applied to an initial field (be it the natural numbers or the complex set), could be due to the transformations, or intrinsic of the underlying field. The parent comment stated that we're in the former case, i.e. we are seeing artifacts due to the transformation itself and we're not in front of some new properties of the numbers. It implied that this is a bad thing, or at least that's how I read that 'merely'. My (admittedly cryptic) reply was meant to show that similar results are worth attention as well, just like the Mandelbrot set, and should not be quickly dismissed as an unwanted effect.

Re: What do numbers look like?

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very common in general to use this "one-hot encoding" in statistics and machine learning. In many cases using all 2s or all -10s would produce the exact same result in theory, but with more work by the optimizing algorithm, possibly with adverse results as described above. It's easy to reason about mathematically, too. If the input vector is all 1s and 0s, it's easy to read off the result of multiplying tha…

That kind of sounds like normalisation in other contexts ("hey let's just say lightspeed is 1, simplifies the equations"), is that a fair analogy to make?

Normalization of that kind is also used in machine learning and statistics, but it's not quite the same thing. A related technique is "standardization", where are you subtract the mean and divide by the standard deviation, yielding unitless quantities of "standard deviations away from the mean".

However this encoding technique is a bit more like choosing 1 and 0 to represent Boolean values in C: it's convenient, it's easy to reason about, it's mathematically simpler than any other option, and there's no compelling reason to choose anything else anyway.

For binary variables in particular, you sometimes see people using -1 and 1 instead of 0 and 1, to get symmetry around 0. I think this was mostly only used for encoding the labels/outputs of SVM models, where it's mathematically appealing as representing two sides of a hyperplane.

There are a handful of other schemes for encoding "categorical" or "nominal" data of this kind, used in certain statistical applications such as the design and analysis of experiments. These encoding schemes are called contrasts in the stats literature, because they emphasize the differences (the "constrasts") between categories.

Re: What do numbers look like?

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you trying to say?

The structures that emerge from a series of transformations applied to an initial field (be it the natural numbers or the complex set), could be due to the transformations, or intrinsic of the underlying field. The parent comment stated that we're in the former case, i.e. we are seeing artifacts due to the transformation itself and we're not in front of some new properties of the numbers. It implied that this is a ba…

so, your point is that the mandelbrot set isn't merely an artifact, if i understand you correctly.
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