Controlling a 2D robot arm with deep reinforcement learning and Floydhub

15 February 2019

Controlling a 2D robot arm with deep reinforcement learning and Floydhub My new post is on the Floydhub blog. Had a great time collaborating with the team. Check it out if you’re bored of predicting rent prices when you’re trying to learn about machine learning.
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My 2 favorite books of 2018

17 January 2019

My 2 favorite books of 2018 Last year, my two favorite books were surpringly not textbooks. The first one was Leonardo Da Vinci the biography of the famous inventor and painter by Walter Isaacson and the second was Bad Blood an investigative report on the shenanigans of a silicon valley startup called Theranos. The reason I’m bringing up these two books is because usually after reading a great book I’m willed into action. Especially in...
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node.js in your browser

03 October 2015

node in your browser Node got us javascript on the backend and Tonic got us Node on the browser. This allows us to launch a new browser instance from a node shell which is running on your browser. You can also extrapolate the aforementioned scenario to all sorts of perverse implementations of browsers running in shells running on a browser running in a shell etc… With Tonic, I see no need to have static Github...
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Alternative Numbering Schemes

18 March 2015

Alternative Numbering Schemes Today’s post will be a short one, I recently bought a copy of The Little Schemer and have had a really fun experience with it. The Little Schemer introduces many deep mathematical ideas in a concise Socratic treatment. I enjoyed many sections of the book but chose to comment briefly on just one. Representations (What are numbers?) Depending on who you ask you might get a different answer. In the first corner,...
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Occam's Razor

08 March 2015

Occam’s Razor Truth is found where less assumptions are made One of the cornerstones of Machine Learning is Occam’s Razor. Essentially it’s a principle by which two competing hypotheses about the world may be compared according to their simplicity. An appropriate definition may be lifted off from Wikipedia: The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove...
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Color Theory and Theory of Computation

02 March 2015

Color Theory and The Theory of Computation Over the past few months I’ve been trying to train my eye to appreciate better design. People tend to find better designed blogs to be more trustworthy. While content is king, looks matter too. So I know it will be worthwhile for me to learn more about design. Today I decided to explore the topic of color theory. Disclaimer: The below is an informal argument that does not...
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Quantum Computers Can Simulate Classical Computers

14 February 2015

Simulating a Classical Computer Using a Quantum Computer An easier way to think of quantum computers I was very fortunate my last quarter as a graduate student at UCSD to have helped organize a quantum computing seminar. I was strongly influenced by Aaronson’s excellent book Quantum Computing Since Democritus where Aaronson makes a strong point that Quantum Computing is easy if you abstract away the physics. That may sound controversial but it really isn’t. Do...
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Probability without measure theory

14 February 2015

What does it mean to say \(P(event) = something \) This blog post is an attempt to explain the following tutorial to a more general audience. I gave that tutorial to explain some of my favorite ideas in the Shafer and Vovk book Probability and Finance, It’s only a Game! Horse Gambling Games Way before Probability Theory was its own field let alone a field with rigorous foundations, two fairly celebrated mathematicians Pascal and Fermat...
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Why Sci-Fi might not be so good at predicting the future

15 November 2014

Asimov’s Foundation I recently just finished Asimov’s fourth Foundation Book: Foundation and Edge. The series is excellent and I wholeheartedly recommend it to any sci-fi fans. The empire is about to fall into 30000 years of darkness when Hari Seldon Mathematician/Prophet establishes a Foundation of scholars to document all of human knowledge as part of a complicated 1000 year plan to establish a stronger second empire. The first novel of the series was written in...
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