History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake. — James Joyce When we think of the 20th century we think of a fair share of profound tragedies. Some might think of famous disasters like the sinking of the Titanic or the Chernobyl disaster. Above most tragedies tower the…

For the first time in my life, I played not merely with my hands, but with my mind. — Dr. B., Chess Novella In Stefan Zweig’s Chess Novella, the reigning world chess champion, Czentovic, is on board a ship from New York to Buenos Aires, and is challenged to a…

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” J. Robert Oppenheimer In Hindu cosmology, the world cycles between birth, life, and destruction. At the ending stage of a…

How Large Neural Networks Generalize — Less is more. -Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Less is more only when more is too much. - Frank Loyd Wright Deep neural networks (DNNs) have profoundly transformed the landscape of machine learning, often becoming synonymous with the broader fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yet, their rise would…

On The Universality of Patterns in Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence — ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ - Robert A. Henlein The “No Free Lunch” theorem in the realm of machine learning reminds me of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem within the world of mathematics. While these theorems are frequently cited, they are seldom explained in depth, and the implications…

How a simple tool gives rise to astonishing complexity — Taking something simple and scaling it up to achieve something more complex is a powerful idea, laying the foundation of life, computers (based on the simplicity of the Turing machine), and deep learning techniques (based on the idea of the neurons in a neural network). More is frequently different, which…

We are taking continuous steps towards ever more intelligent and powerful AI systems, and it is clear that even narrow AI systems have increasing influence over our lives. Understanding them and maintaining control over them might be one of the most existentially relevant tasks of the century. This task is…

“14 games is a fairly low sample size. If you want to determine who the best player is, you need more matches. If you want to find the best player, you need to change the format to increase the chance of finding the best player.” Magnus Carlsen, World Chess Champion …

“The ability to generalize to unseen data is at the core of machine learning.” At the heart of much of current AI research is the question of how to make algorithms generalize to unseen data. In the context of machine learning, most models are trained and evaluated on data following…