Although Markov chains have use in machine learning, a more trivial application that pops up from time-to-time is in text generation. Given a sufficiently large enough corpus, the generated text will usually be unique and comprehensible (at least from sentence…
Will I Get Rained On?
I’m a bike commuter and while I really enjoy it, getting rained on is a little bit annoying. This is actually something that people are most concerned about when they learn I commute by bike, but honestly, it doesn’t happen…
Drake and the Back of the Envelope
One of the many handy things about the math of probability is that we can simply stack probabilities of individual events to get the overall probability for the scenario. For example, the probability of a coin landing on heads is…
How quickly can a computer learn Tic Tac Toe?
In my post last week, I discussed my Java implementation of the MENACE Tic Tac Toe machine. I also mentioned how playing against the MENACE manually is simply too time consuming. And since all programmers are lazy, I of course…
Predicting real names while blocking fake names
I was on a forum recently where I noticed several of the posts were moderators informing new users that they were violating the site’s rules by not using a real name. The rules require users to use a real name…