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When do we stop calling this counting and start calling it estimation?
by imoverclocked 2y ago
When do we stop calling this counting and start calling it estimation?
- pmontra 2y agoYes, even the subtile states "a simple algorithm for estimating large numbers of distinct objects".
- cubefox 2y agoThis doesn't excuse the title though.
- vlovich123 2y agoAs soon as people start reading past the headline.
- 112233 2y agotbh, the title (and introduction) did a lot to dissuade me from finishing the (really good) article. It was actually informative, why dress it as a SEO blogspam?
- seanhunter 2y agoPresumably so it is optimised for search engines and people find it. Publishers generally have good data about where their audience comes from. They wouldn't do this if it wasn't the best way they know of to maximise readership.
- a57721 2y agoI've been following Quanta for some time, I'm sure they don't care about SEO and number of visitors, they care about the quality of texts. They write for the general audience, and even though they try to preserve the scientific accuracy, sometimes their explanations may seem oversimplified and even a bit confusing when you come from the same field. It's not clickbait, it's their popular science style.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoSo they can get paid for their work? Are you giving them anything?
- lupire 2y agoIt's Quanta. Their mission is to make laypeople like math (not understand math), so they drown the math in sugar.
- card_zero 2y agoSeems this is one of those things like UUIDs where we rely on it being very unlikely to be wrong, because statistics. > the accuracy of this technique scales with the size of the memory. I wonder if that's proportional to the number of distinct items to count, though. > if the [memory] is so big that it fits all the words, then we can get 100% accuracy Yes, but then the algorithm isn't being used any more, that's just normal counting. They counted the distinct words in Hamlet with a memory size of 100 words, about 2.5% of the number to find, and got a result that was off by 2. If you do the same with the whole of Shakespeare, again using 2.5% of the memory needed to hold all the distinct words, is the accuracy better? Anyway, this is limited to counting, and doesn't help list what the words are, though quickly counting them first is perhaps a way to speed up the task of actually finding them?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BlackFly 2y agoWhen it is actually impossible to count something and when the error between estimation and an exact answer is not significant the pedantic distinction is not helpful. The same thing happens with measurement. No measurement is ever exact. If I said I was measuring a count, someone would probably correct to say that I am counting. Common speech is like that.