Brian Christian Quotes
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There are many ways to relax a problem, and we’ve seen three of the most important. The first, Constraint Relaxation, simply removes some constraints altogether and makes progress on a looser form of the problem before coming back to reality. The second, Continuous Relaxation, turns discrete or binary choices into continua: when deciding between iced tea and lemonade, first imagine a 50–50 “Arnold Palmer” blend and then round it up or down. The third, Lagrangian Relaxation, turns impossibilities into mere penalties, teaching the art of bending the rules..
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Computer scientists have been working on finding this balance for more than fifty years. They even have a name for it: the explore/exploit tradeoff.
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I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.
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Computer scientists would call this a ping attack or a “denial of service attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos.
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Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.
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They would randomly assign patients to either ECMO or the conventional treatment until a prespecified number of deaths was observed in one of the groups. Then they would switch all the patients in the study to the more effective treatment of the two.
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How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
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If meaning lies even partially in usage, then you subtly alter the language every time you use it. You couldn't leave it intact if you tried
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Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking.
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So explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in. The interval makes the strategy.
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Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.
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As Trick points out, sports leagues aren’t concerned with determining the rankings as quickly and expeditiously as possible. Instead, sports calendars are explicitly designed to maintain tension throughout the season, something that has rarely been a concern of sorting theory.
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The patent talks about anticipatory package shipping, which the press seized upon as though Amazon could somehow mail you something before you bought it.
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From the mid-eighteenth century onward, computers, frequently women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering firms, and universities, performing calculations and doing numerical analysis, sometimes with the use of a rudimentary calculator.
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The most prevalent critique of modern communications is that we are “always connected.” But the problem isn’t that we’re always connected; we’re not. The problem is that we’re always buffered. The difference is enormous.
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Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
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Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak.
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The New York Times reported in June 2010—in an article titled “The End of the Best Friend...
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During abusive conversations each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. -- Verbal abuse is less complex than other forms of conversation! "Aware of their stateless, knee-jerk character, I recognize that the terse remark I want to blurt has far more to do with some kind of "reflex" to the very last sentence of the conversation than it does with either the actual issue at hand or the person I'm talking to. . . . I steer myself toward a more "stateful" response.
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In fact, for any possible drawing of winning tickets in attempts, the expectation is simply the number of wins plus one, divided by the number of attempts plus two: (w+1)⁄(n+2).
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It's really nice to have things to mail to people when they mail you things, or trade to people at shows. Something homemade, it feels... down to earth.
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Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is “Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner.” The entire plot of Before Sunrise is “Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna.” But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema...
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Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, definable as the art most susceptible to lossy compression.
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When the future is foggy, it turns out you don't need a calendar -- just a to-do list.