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Markov Chains for programmers
- raister 5y agoInteresting find - really introductory examples. Good read, recommend it.
- m000 5y ago- "Markov Chains for programmers." Cool! - Opens PDF. - Typeset in Computer Modern. - Starts running, screaming in Comic Sans. Jokes aside, CM is not the only game for math-heavy documents. Something like Libertinus [1] would probably be more screen-friendly. [1] https://github.com/alerque/libertinus https://github.com/alerque/libertinus
- kjs3 5y agoThis is seriously the most insightful comment you can come up with? If it is, you would do well to consider silence.
- layer8 5y agoThis has been downvoted, but I think selecting more screen-friendly fonts is a valid concern nowadays. Personally I would also like to see a reflowable format (which I guess would mean HTML with MathJax).
- mattalex 5y agoUse latexml this is what's running under the hood of ar5iv https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/ https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/ and should be able to compile every Latex document to html
- spekcular 5y agoWhat's wrong with computer modern?
- dddnzzz334 5y agoComputer Modern is the best looking font
- MonkeyClub 5y agoWith Comic Sans a close second, surely.
- raister 5y agoOnly the frontispiece uses a different font (can't say for sure whether it is Comic Sans though) - the rest is pure Times new Roman.
- raister 5y agoThe author has uploaded a version of the book in the libertinus font - I guess he heard your complaints!
- westcort 5y agoI have used Markov chains for a few fun projects, like this Markov chain headline generator (https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Headlines.html https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Headlines.html), and a Markov generator based on a certain someone's Twitter feed (https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Trump.html https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Trump.html), but this looks like a good resources for more serious applications.
- hvasilev 5y agoThere are just so many of these fun AI-related concepts that seem really cool and you get the chill that they will take over the world some day. Decades pass and you realize they either have little to no application or are incredibly niche :( Too bad that "solution in a search of a problem" is generally bad approach to problem-solving. I wish our industry was more fun as a whole.
- klysm 5y agoMarkov chain Monte Carlo is incredibly useful and widely applied.
- vanderZwan 5y agoTo give an example: Prediction by Partial Matching is basically a Markov chain in disguise, and an incredibly powerful way to do compression that beats most other forms of text compression (at the price of having a lot more memory overhead) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_by_partial_matching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_by_partial_matching
- it_does_follow 5y agoNot to mention that the entire class of Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques only form a subset of general uses for Markov chains. Markov chains form the basis of n-gram language models, which are still useful today. Markov chains are also the basis of the Page-rank algorithm. Hidden Markov Models (which are just an extension of Markov Chains to have unobserved states) are a powerful and commonly used time series model found all over the place in industry. In the pre-deep learning model Markov chains (and HMMs) in particular had very wide spread usage in Speech processing. They are probably one of the most practical statistical techniques out there (out side of obvious example like linear models).
- needlefish 5y agoNot to mention, it was less than a decade ago that one could have said about neural networks "Decades pass and you realize they either have little to no application or are incredibly niche".
- jonititan 5y agoPymc3 is pretty good. https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/ https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/
- b20000 5y agoit’s for programmers but comes with matlab code and excel sheets
- Jtsummers 5y agoNothing wrong with either of those. Also, if you take the time to check out the book or its GitHub repo, then you will see that there is also C code and C "challenges" (projects) for the reader to go through.
- dr_kiszonka 5y agoRight, but it is a pretty unusual combination and 1.5 of these languages are proprietary.
- raister 5y agoThe solutions in proprietary formats are for demonstration only - you could refer to the C code at all times. And also, they could be easily ported to GNU/Octave and LibreOffice Calc without any issues.
- b20000 5y agothere is a large gap between code in matlab typically and stuff you can use in production written in C. this is for example the case with DSP code. so it is a red flag indicating the author is an academic and lacks actual experience writing production code.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 5y agoI take it you've never worked on radio systems, radar systems, satellites, or avionics then. Or with engineers working on new systems designs and modeling. (And those are just the areas I've used or seen it used by non-academics from my own experience, not at all a comprehensive list) Matlab has lots of non-academic uses, and when someone claims it's only for academics it's usually a sign that they have never used it or only saw it in their freshman "programming for engineers" class or maybe numerical methods.
- HackOfAllTrades 5y agoFirst thought upon reading the title: "Surely you could pay them to stay."
- ganzuul 5y agohttps://github.com/coleifer/irc/blob/master/bots/redisbot.py https://github.com/coleifer/irc/blob/master/bots/redisbot.py This is great fun. Once it has learned a little about you and your friends it sometimes spits out a lyrical home-run. It is of course you who provide the intelligence of interpretation, but it still feels mysterious when it 'talks' in a way relevant to the context.