Complex Systems Summer School 2013-Blog
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| Complex Systems Summer School 2013 |
Use this page as an informal forum to share your opinion and discuss anything at CSSS'13.
Students are encouraged to share their observations, insights, and opinions about daily lecture content as well as extracurricular activities.
Post your own links to notes, interesting articles, and anything else you think might contribute to the program.
Interesting article on the new Traveling Salesman Problem, as implemented by UPS: [1]
Plugged Book List
I thought it might be worth keeping a list of books mentioned/plugged during the talks. So far I have (and feel free to add to it):
- A New Kind of Science
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
- Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style
- The Nature of Computation
The origins of Robby the Robot: the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. For you Shakespeare fans, it's a retelling of The Tempest. --Manish
For those of you interested in modeling cities, here [[2]] is a nice article in the Economist from today (June 6th)- Swati
Bad Hessian, a computational sociology blog.
I think I may have mentioned it to several people, but Google Earth Engine is basically the last 20 years of Landsat imagery on a Google Earth / Google Maps interface. It very compellingly demonstrates the explosive growth over the past 20 years. http://earthengine.google.org/#intro -- JP
Click on Las Vegas or Dubai or something like that to go to the applet
As requested, here is "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." A possible "worst case" unfriendly AI scenario (far worse than Skynet). Warning: You might find it disturbing. I added a bit of color, and included the punchcode images from the original work: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream -- Nix
Since Dr. Hubler is illustrating video feedback, you might like to see this video that Jim Crutchfield made in 1984 on the nonlinear dynamics of video feedback: video -- Nix
For anyone who was wondering: the yodelling pickle
- Yodeling Pickle had something to say about free will. Unfortunately, no-one takes her seriously due to the language barrier. :( I wonder if someone has tried tossing her into an FMRI... -- Nix
Like the rule 110 elementary cellular automaton, Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete. This means you can 'build a computer' in the 'universe' that is Conway's Game of Life that can compute 'anything.' This person built a computer that implements Conway's Game of life... *in* Conway's Game of Life: Life in Life -- Nix
Here is the trailer for the movie that came out in 2012 about when a group of four men prove that P=NP. [[3]]
A proof of the halting state problem, written in the style of Dr. Seuss. Scooping the loop snooper
A nice writeup on MaxEnt by a physicist+statistician (a rare combo) who also happens to be an upcoming speaker at the Complex Systems Summer School:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/max-ent.html
The whole writeup is great, but here's a key point:
"But within an exponential family, the maximum-likelihood estimate of the parameters is the one where observations match expectations, so the maximum entropy distribution is the maximum-likelihood estimate within that exponential family."
In other words, MaxEnt isn't magic: it's doing near-standard parametric inference, where it restricts itself to distributions in the exponential family. - Dave D
For those interested in the interpretation of the entropy of a random variable as the expected number of optimal binary questions needed to identify a random variable, see this blog post I wrote a while back. For dyadic distributions, you get exact equivalence between the entropy and the expected number of questions. For non-dyadic distributions, you can show with a bit of work that the expected number of questions is bounded between entropy and entropy plus one. - Dave D