On the role of uncertainty in evolution, markets, neuroscience, and AI — The world is unpredictable in many ways. This has been the natural state of affairs for all living beings fighting an uphill battle for survival within an ever-evolving world. And while modern life has given us more certainties, with scientific theories setting out to explain the mess around us, science…

And their connections to Neuroscience, AI and Russian Poetry — “My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?” ― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin It might seem strange to start an article on Markov chains (also called Markov processes) with a quote from a 19th-century Russian poem, but there is a surprising…

Keep on with the force don’t stop Don’t stop ’til you get enough. - Michael Jackson The world is a rich place of opportunities waiting to be discovered, of actions to be taken and choices to be made. We mere mortals have to navigate this world with partial and biased…

How humans find meaning when they can’t find the answers. — The 14th century. Times are tough — the Hundred Years’ War is raging, newly freed peasants are trying to find a place in society, and a plague is afoot. The Black Death has already killed a third of the population in some parts of Europe, and no one really knows…

How to synchronize your biological clock using light — Seeing the light is a choice, not seeing the light is no choice. Douglas Horton The pandemic has changed the working habits of millions of people around the globe. For many, remote work has quickly turned from an emergency solution to the new status quo, with many companies offering their…

On the limitations of reductionism — “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe”. P.W.Anderson What is the most real thing in the world? Is it the number pi? Is it the quantum fields merrily vibrating…

On the interplay between art, emotions, and our brains that construct them — “‘Tristan und Isolde’ is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel… I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic.” - Leonard Bernstein Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde from 1865 was one of the most…

The role of attention in neuroscience, deep learning, and everyday life — The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most intricate machines mankind has ever built. When it’s running, every second approximately one billion particles smash into each other at velocities close to the speed of light, probing physics beyond the edges of the current standard model of particle physics. …

Looking beyond the data surface — “Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Science firmly rests on the power of observation. Models triumph or fall after they are compared to observations in the real world. But in more sophisticated models, something very…