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Oct. 12th, 2005 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackthat it is not the beginning of the work, but the continuation thereof until it be thoroughly finished, that yieldeth the true glory
[which I remember as a commonly-used prayer at school, but cannot find through Google; on the other hand, of all the organisations of the Earth, my secondary school is among those whose possession of a totally independent prayer-book would be considered least surprising]
Not one of them even close to finished, though I can remember nearly all of their goals; and there are more on the other computer. Some I've worked at intensely for one evening, some for a week of evenings; I don't know how many of them would take much more than a month of evenings to complete, or be worth the effort once completed.
[which I remember as a commonly-used prayer at school, but cannot find through Google; on the other hand, of all the organisations of the Earth, my secondary school is among those whose possession of a totally independent prayer-book would be considered least surprising]
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom tom 136 Feb 4 2005 mandy drwxrwxrwx 11 tom tom 374 Feb 6 2005 Spheres in a cube drwxrwxrwx 286 tom tom 9724 Feb 6 2005 FRACTREE drwxr-xr-x 12 tom tom 408 Feb 11 2005 fixedprec drwxr-xr-x 16 tom tom 544 Mar 15 2005 random_graph drwxr-xr-x 6 tom tom 204 Mar 17 2005 enceladus drwxrwxrwx 31 tom tom 1054 Mar 17 2005 orbital drwxr-xr-x 68 tom tom 2312 Mar 25 2005 srtm drwxr-xr-x 31 tom tom 1054 Mar 31 2005 pentagon drwxr-xr-x 15 tom tom 510 Apr 19 19:55 crt-fft drwxr-xr-x 18 tom tom 612 Apr 19 21:17 primestrings drwxr-xr-x 15 tom tom 510 Apr 25 21:42 irreducible drwxr-xr-x 7 tom tom 238 May 2 22:36 streetmap drwxrwxrwx 24 tom tom 816 Jun 3 21:08 repel drwxr-xr-x 64 tom tom 2176 Jun 13 19:09 optbin drwxr-xr-x 7 tom tom 238 Jun 19 19:19 mmxsort drwxr-xr-x 12 tom tom 408 Jun 23 21:08 eurcit drwxr-xr-x 13 tom tom 442 Jun 23 23:09 demographic drwxr-xr-x 10 tom tom 340 Jun 29 10:10 smallres drwxr-xr-x 7 tom tom 238 Jun 29 11:34 squareful drwxr-xr-x 9 tom tom 306 Aug 1 19:40 connected -rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 1276 Aug 14 11:12 ling.cpp -rwxr-xr-x 1 tom tom 29160 Aug 14 14:33 a.out -rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 1769 Aug 14 14:34 ling2.cpp drwxr-xr-x 41 tom tom 1394 Aug 22 23:18 haskell_stuff drwxr-xr-x 8 tom tom 272 Sep 15 19:59 primefilt drwxr-xr-x 21 tom tom 714 Sep 28 23:25 kylix drwxr-xr-x 8 tom tom 272 Oct 8 22:22 dudcc drwxr-xr-x 28 tom tom 952 Oct 12 00:42 diffeq
Not one of them even close to finished, though I can remember nearly all of their goals; and there are more on the other computer. Some I've worked at intensely for one evening, some for a week of evenings; I don't know how many of them would take much more than a month of evenings to complete, or be worth the effort once completed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 08:48 am (UTC)Attributed to Sir Francis Drake:
When thou givest to thy servants
to endeavour any great matter
Grant us also to know that it is not the beginning
but the continuing of the same unto the end
until it be thoroughly finished
which yieldeth the true glory.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 04:40 pm (UTC)There's also a failure model 'I have N hard discs; sometimes, when I turn the computer on, some of these hard discs will have decided to depart and contemplate their inner doorstop; you can recognise which ones have done this by the grinding noise'. I was trying to figure out useful encodings for that case (something like RAID5, but able to handle two or three disc failures); DudCorrectingCode rather than ErrorCorrectingCode.
Cycling to work this morning, I realised that correcting N errors was equivalent to surviving 2N disc failures [for N errors, you want the encodings of different messages to be at least 2N+1 bits apart; for M failures, you need only M+1 differences], so I'd just be re-inventing Hamming codes.
The only moderately interesting observation was that, if you just start at 00000 and count up, writing down the first thing you come to that differs in the right number of places from everything else you've written down, the bits of the result seem always to be linear functions of the bits you're trying to encode.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-12 04:46 pm (UTC)SURPRISINGNESS THEORY 1)
Date: 2005-10-15 04:45 am (UTC)-----------------------
Written on 4am, Saturday 15th October 2005 after waking up with the germ of the theory buzzing in my
mind. It had to be written down.
This note describes the motivation and basis for making mathematical our heuristic notion of how
surprising (or credible) a day, month or year in the life of someone is. This will give us an
mathematical tool to give a credibility score to stories told us by people we know. Is someone taking
too many sick days? Do too many flukish events happen to a given person to be credible? Is someone
pulling the wool over our eyes? We want to know this. Governments and industry want to know this. Our
bosses want to know this. If this notion of the credibility score turns out to have statistical
validity then its applications are endless. No more will people be able to lie and tell tall stories
and get away with it.
This note was inspired by a female friend I shall call Pamela. We were friends for six months from
Jan to June 2005 and she told me many unlikely stories about her life, each one surprising, but in
totality they seemed quite incredible. I pondered how I could use my mathematical skills to draw a
line in the sand and say, "any more tall stories Pamela and I do not believe you any more - I am 95%
confident that you are lying to me." I had to discount the possibility that she is merely a unlucky/
amazing / unusual person. This note is an attempt to make that vision reality.
EXAMPLE
---------
I knew Pamela for six months. During that time she told me:
S1) she was a psychiatrist
S2) she was Indian in origin
S3) she had parents divorced
E4) she got chicken pox in the second week i knew her at age of 26.
E5) her builder fell off a ladder just before doing her patio
S6) she had a fear of acquaintances falling off ladders
S7)her brother studied maths at cambridge like I had and studied to be an actuarial trainee like me
and was very IT literate like I am supposed to be.
E8)she had had a car accident last year which left her with back trouble
S10) she was only the second girl corresponded with on match.com and she immediately asked that I
ring her.
S11) she was a house owner
S12) both her parents were doctors
E13) she drove her car into her builder's van last year and he was unhappy about that.
SURPRISINGNESS THEORY PART 2) - THE MATHS
Date: 2005-10-15 04:48 am (UTC)HEURISTIC THINKING
--------------------
Events Ei and States Si have each occured to only Ni different people on this planet Earth. An event is something that occured at a particular instant and we would use the perfect tense to describe. A state is something that has happened at no particular time and we use the imperfect tense to describe. Thus we can say that S2 [Indian origin]occurs to approximately 1 billion people on this planet as there are a billion indians. E4 occurs to less people but is hard to pin down how many. The basic idea is to work out how many people the combination of Ei and Si occurs to. One can carefully use assumptions of independence of events to assist with this. All of Ei and Si have the property N that they are noteworthy events and states, in that ' they stuck in my mind'. This is where it gets heuristic because any given person P will have e noteworthy events E1...Ee, and s noteworthy states S1...Ss. We seek to calculate the duplication factor of a person D(P,K) which is simply the number of people we estimate there are on the planet Earth who have undergone noteworthy events E1...Ee, and states S1..Ss and K is a measure of how well we know them and so how many noteworthy states and events we know about [clearly I know lots of noteworthy events and states about myself and not many about a stranger in Minneapolis]. If D(P,K) is below some threshold value t(K)then we would say that it is likely we are being lied to, or that we are in the company of a particularly extraordinary person.
This is very heuristic and I don't know much stats. I think there might be some mileage in this. The concept of the number of people D(P,K)=D(P,E1,...,Ee,S1,...Ss) is a solid concept BUT all we end up with is a series of spot values D(P,K) for each person on Earth. However we could get everyone on earth to compute their own local D(P,K) for every other person on earth and then plot D(P,K) against K for all K. This gives a graph G(P) for each person which is their SURPRISINGNESS graph. The difficulty is taking our heuristic notion of 'noteworthiness' N and how well we each know each other K and deducing the axis of a graph from it.
I guess we could measure how well we know someone in other ways. How long have we read about them or talked to them? I know about Tony Blair but have never talked to him. I know about Mum and Dad but never read about them.
METHOD
--------
For me to calculate my D(P,K) for Pamela is easy. I just make crude estimates of how many people there are on planet earth with events Ei having happened to them and States Si being undergone by them.
I then need to calculate K which is how well I know Pamela. I have scores for time spent talking, reading about her and gossiping about her. I can combine this to get a number k which is how well I know her compared to everyone else in the world. So k=1 for myself k=2 for mum k=3 for dad (or vice versa) etc. Possibly Tony Blair would have a low k in this. Then for Pamela (P) I get everyone in the world to plot their own personal D(P,K) on the graph and arrive at a G(P) which is the SURPRISINGNESS GRAPH.
CONCLUSION
------------
Here we have a tool which, [if statistically rigorous], can be used to solve a wide variety of world ills. We shall discover whether it is indeed BLAIR or BLIAR. We shall never pull another sickie. Leaves on the line will be a distant memory. More importantly people like myself who are troubled by psychotic symptoms can calculate the surprisingness of what they are told, get the graph G(P) and know whether to trust people without resorting to psychotic speculation. We will know from G(P) whether someone is likely to be trustworthy to immediate family or to strangers.
SURPRISINGNESS THEORY PART 3) - FURTHER WORK
Date: 2005-10-15 04:49 am (UTC)------------------------
I am a bit worried that some people e.g. Tony Blair have far more noteworthy events than others and each one e.g.Starting Iraq war is not done by many on Earth. However we can accommodate this because Tony Blair is a very well known person. Also, the graph G(Blair) just shows really how many people on earth are like Tony Blair in their experience from the viewpoint of all people in the world. Clearly under any criteria, Tony Blair is a very unusual person and so he is genuinely unusual rather than being inferred to be unusual due to providing us with fallacious events and states e.g. I am having a sickie from food poisoning every day this month.
The stats needs tightening on this. What do I mean tightening? There is no stats yet. It's all heuristic arm waving as yet!! Ho hum.