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Math being hard has always confused me; spend just one hour learning computer vision algorithms or neural networks and you'll find them to be very mathematical.

Math being hard has always confused me; spend just one hour learning computer vision algorithms or neural networks and you'll find them to be very mathematical. It even explains nature so well, what with fibonnacci and so on. So why do I struggle? Surely I should be able to tap into the enormous power that can translate random sound waves into coherent sentences, or a bunch of pixels into an upside down hippo. Nope. Instead when I try to multiply two matrices my head ends up overheating...

firethief 10y ago
A GPU excels at rendering fractals, but would struggle to compile the simple programs that generate them.
Jugurtha 10y ago
>I try to multiply two matrices my head ends up overheating How do you go about multiplying two matrices? Different people do it differently. It can be easy or hard depending on how you do it.. When you multiply, do you write your matrices in such a way that the bottom left corner of your second matrix sits near the upper right corner of the first matrix? (i.e: b31 is above and slightly to the right of a13) Here's what I mean: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Matrix_multiplication_diagram_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Matrix_m... If the resulting matrix is R with elements rij, then r12 (yellow and red) is equal to a11.b12 + a12.b22. You can multiply matrices really fast just by popping the second one into that position. It avoids clutter and confusion. You'll probably never make mistakes again.
munchbunny 10y ago
Not a remotely scientific speculation, but as far as the animal world goes you see much more "specialized processing" than "general purpose computing". I think this explains why we suck at general purpose computing but are remarkably good at things that general purpose computers have trouble doing. For example, your brain (and dog brains!) handle some tasks like catching a ball while running/jumping, perceiving depth, and responding to a name which are very computationally expensive. If you programmed a robot to do any of those things, you'd be multiplying matrices and doing FFT's everywhere. Somehow our brain does the same thing, but we don't have any means to observe the internal computations required to accomplish the tasks. I'd also argue that general purpose computing capacity is a very rare thing in the animal kingdom because in most cases only enough capacity is needed to glue the specialized parts together.
dmd 10y ago
Snails don't compute phi.

firethief 10y ago

A GPU excels at rendering fractals, but would struggle to compile the simple programs that generate them.

Jugurtha 10y ago

>I try to multiply two matrices my head ends up overheating How do you go about multiplying two matrices? Different people do it differently. It can be easy or hard depending on how you do it.. When you multiply, do you write your matrices in such a way that the bottom left corner of your second matrix sits near the upper right corner of the first matrix? (i.e: b31 is above and slightly to the right of a13) Here's what I mean: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Matrix_multiplication_diagram_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Matrix_m... If the resulting matrix is R with elements rij, then r12 (yellow and red) is equal to a11.b12 + a12.b22. You can multiply matrices really fast just by popping the second one into that position. It avoids clutter and confusion. You'll probably never make mistakes again.

munchbunny 10y ago

Not a remotely scientific speculation, but as far as the animal world goes you see much more "specialized processing" than "general purpose computing". I think this explains why we suck at general purpose computing but are remarkably good at things that general purpose computers have trouble doing. For example, your brain (and dog brains!) handle some tasks like catching a ball while running/jumping, perceiving depth, and responding to a name which are very computationally expensive. If you programmed a robot to do any of those things, you'd be multiplying matrices and doing FFT's everywhere. Somehow our brain does the same thing, but we don't have any means to observe the internal computations required to accomplish the tasks. I'd also argue that general purpose computing capacity is a very rare thing in the animal kingdom because in most cases only enough capacity is needed to glue the specialized parts together.

dmd 10y ago

Snails don't compute phi.