Probabilistic prediction: this is primarily going to be used for robots that monitor, kill or assist with killing people.
Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
41–50 of 81 posts
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do we say about languages built on C? Is it 100 lines of code but there are hundreds of thousands of lines of code for that higher level language you just coded? I don't think libraries count in terms of code. We all use code to program. Standing on the shoulder that preceded us. Using a library and a function should just count for the most part.
How about C itself? Hello World is about 850 lines of code after you run the preprocessor on it.
You do not need 850 lines of code to output "hello world" unless you actually include a header. You could just stub printf instead of including and get it done with like 10 lines of code.
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#43> “It goes beyond image classification — the most popular task in computer vision — and tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision: What is the right representation of visual scenes? Can someone knowledgeable in graphics research explain the context that this question comes from? If I am reading the question correctly, I infer that the question suggests that there exists a right way to r…
Think about Dreaming. "seeing" during a dream state works by experiencing pure data representation of the real world. People fluent in lucid dreaming can tell you something funny happens when you try to thorough examine objects while sleeping. Constructed worlds tend to be skin deep, and fall apart when poked. Everything is build with ideas drawn from your experience. Its Plato's Allegory of the Cave all the way down…
I don't see that the question of that algorithm's existence is any different from cheatsheet's original connection to a question that might have no or many answers.
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#44> “It goes beyond image classification — the most popular task in computer vision — and tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision: What is the right representation of visual scenes? Can someone knowledgeable in graphics research explain the context that this question comes from? If I am reading the question correctly, I infer that the question suggests that there exists a right way to r…
Think about Dreaming. "seeing" during a dream state works by experiencing pure data representation of the real world. People fluent in lucid dreaming can tell you something funny happens when you try to thorough examine objects while sleeping. Constructed worlds tend to be skin deep, and fall apart when poked. Everything is build with ideas drawn from your experience. Its Plato's Allegory of the Cave all the way down…
> What if we could build an algorithm able to render movies from books?
Bob Coyne has been working on a system for generating images of still scenes from text descriptions for about 15 years now:
https://www.wordseye.com/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~coyne/papers/wordseye_siggraph.p...
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#45Is that 50 lines of code, or 50 lines of using a library that's thousands of lines of code?
It's a fair question, but from my heydays doing ML research even good libraries can be pretty revolutionary. The engineering-side of ML is still in relative infancy. For a great example look at all the papers Andrew McCallum's group has been able to publish by building on top of FACTORIE: they get to focus their time on the problem at hand rather than all the math required to solve it. Basically they can write code t…
> ML is getting closer and closer to being an everyday tool for engineers rather than something that requires you to be a full-time math person
I so wish! As a Sr Data Scientist, I interview potential candidates quite often, many of these are 10x engineers.
Me: (2,3,4) is a vector.
Eng: Ok.
Me: Gimme a unit vector in the same direction.
Eng 1: ???
Eng 2: "It can be done. I don't know how, but with Spark it can be done".
Eng 3: I will need R. ( given R, he fiddles with it for 5 minutes getting nowhere fast )
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#46> “It goes beyond image classification — the most popular task in computer vision — and tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision: What is the right representation of visual scenes? Can someone knowledgeable in graphics research explain the context that this question comes from? If I am reading the question correctly, I infer that the question suggests that there exists a right way to r…
The wiggle word here is "right", I suppose. It's easy to ascribe meanings to that word which are very difficult to use---my limited understanding of Philosophy makes me think that this is the realm of ideas like "qualia" and the like. For a long time statisticians wrangled over this word in a reduced context. The "art" of statistics is to build a model of the world which is sufficiently detailed to capture interestin…
I like this definition, it's almost equivalent to the one given below by me: if you have a good predictor you can compress the information well, but not optimally. But to compress optimally, you need more than an optimal (single outcome) predictor, you need a predictor that will output probabilities of various events close to the true probability.
So in some sense optimal compression gives the best you could hope, up to limitations of the probabilistic models, which is why I like this explanation.
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do we say about languages built on C? Is it 100 lines of code but there are hundreds of thousands of lines of code for that higher level language you just coded? I don't think libraries count in terms of code. We all use code to program. Standing on the shoulder that preceded us. Using a library and a function should just count for the most part.
True, but the parent commenter is getting at something important. The article suggests that researchers have found a new, much more concise way to express the solutions to difficult problems. That's different from a library, which merely packages pre-built solutions to a finite set of problems. It's like the difference between a complete kitchen that fits in your pocket and an iPhone app that lets you order a burrito…
Even a "kitchen that fits in your pocket" isn't general enough. A library that parses a DSL, such that you can then code in that DSL, is still a lame duck if that library, plus the encodings of all the useful solutions in the domain, add up to more code than just the solutions would be when expressed in a general language. The ROI of (learning the DSL + maintaining the library) would be negative.
On the other hand, there are things like Prolog. You can think of Prolog as a backtracking constraint-solving library, and then another library that parses a DSL for expressing facts and procedural constraints and feeds it to the first library. But Prolog's language isn't really a DSL, because it isn't particular to any domain: there's no closed solution-space where Prolog applies. The efficiency gains you get from Prolog's elision of proceduralized contraint-solution code can apply to any program you write. And so its value is unbounded; its ROI is certainly positive, whatever the cost was to implement it.
That's the comparison that's useful here, I think. Is this something that only solves problems in one domain? Or is this something that could be applied to (at least some little bits of) any problem you encounter?
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fair question, but from my heydays doing ML research even good libraries can be pretty revolutionary. The engineering-side of ML is still in relative infancy. For a great example look at all the papers Andrew McCallum's group has been able to publish by building on top of FACTORIE: they get to focus their time on the problem at hand rather than all the math required to solve it. Basically they can write code t…
> ML is getting closer and closer to being an everyday tool for engineers rather than something that requires you to be a full-time math person I so wish! As a Sr Data Scientist, I interview potential candidates quite often, many of these are 10x engineers. Me: (2,3,4) is a vector. Eng: Ok. Me: Gimme a unit vector in the same direction. Eng 1: ??? Eng 2: "It can be done. I don't know how, but with Spark it can be don…
"to save their lives" is a little dramatic, considering they were in a closed tech interview. I'm sure if you gave them 20 seconds on the internet (you know, the resource they would have in a real life problem solving situation) they could find one.
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#49Is that 50 lines of code, or 50 lines of using a library that's thousands of lines of code?
I was thinking the same thing. When is something just a library, and when is it something more? Think about concurrency in Go. Goroutines are cool, but what makes them more than just a cooperative threading library? Channels? Those are just concurrent data structures. The special sauce in Go is the select structure. It allows you to easily express control flow that cannot be expressed without select (or at least not easily). What is the special sauce in these probabilistic programming languages? What could not be implemented using a library?
Re: Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about C itself? Hello World is about 850 lines of code after you run the preprocessor on it.
You do not need 850 lines of code to output "hello world" unless you actually include a header. You could just stub printf instead of including and get it done with like 10 lines of code.
Assembly: Microsoft Macro Assembly
"Hello World"
.MODEL TINY
.CODE