Once you understand the trick of closure conversion (getting rid of anonymous lambdas by introducing a new data object (the closure) and an apply function consuming the various kinds of closures), and the desugaring rule for Haskell's do-notation, it's fun to apply that trick to tiny elegant snippets of Haskell code, transforming them to slightly ( Read more... )

The primary way that we learn is from studying our errors - recording them into archives, sifting and sorting the error archives into piles, taxonomies, ontological schemes and then using that structure as we move forward to reduce error ( Read more... )

I'm interested in combining the idea of lenses (that is, the type-theory/functional-programming idea, see various papers by Pierce and Foster, among lots of other people) to Bayesian update. I think it should be possible to squash these two ideas together (squashing ideas together is almost always possible - the usual question is whether it will be ( Read more... )

Sometimes, through long experience, we have actual understanding of the operational meaning of computer programs. Often, however, we work via metaphors. Some programming paradigms are obviously metaphor-driven: genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and agorics such as Baum's Hayek machine ( Read more... )

I went to a one-day conference on Election Integrity ( Read more... )

1. Use might and van Horn's abstraction strategy (introduce a store and perform structural abstraction on the store) to the standard pathfinding, puzzle-solving, equation solving AI tasks that have used ad-hoc abstractions in the past ( Read more... )

An EDA, or estimation-of-distribution algorithm is an optimization technique ( Read more... )

Let's talk about active and passive entities ( Read more... )

Orc, by Cook and Misra, is an "orchestration language". "Orchestration" is a term associated with buzzwords like "service oriented architecture", and WS-BPEL is another example ( Read more... )

Supposing that you think that cooperating with your past and future selves sounds like a good idea, how could you do it? Cooperating might require coordination, and coordination might require conversation ( Read more... )