Let’s say you are a clothes designer and you want to design a pair of jeans. Since you are new to all this, you go out and collect a bunch of measurements from people to see how to design your jeans as far as sizing is concerned. One aspect of this project would be to see how the height of a person relates to the size of the jeans you are designing. From the measurements you took from those people, you notice a certain pattern that relates height of a person to the overall size of the jeans. Now you generalize this pattern and say that for a given height, a particular size is recommended. To deduce the pattern, you just took a bunch of points and drew a line through them so that it is close to all those points. Pretty simple right! What if there are a few points that are way off from all the other points? Would you consider them while deducing your pattern? You will probably discard them because they are outliers. This was a small sample set, so you could notice these outliers manually. What if there were a million points? Continue reading “Derandomization Of RANSAC”
Year: 2013
Non-ASCII Character Syntax Error In Python
So you played around with Python enough to get to this error? Good. Now let’s see what happened here. When you copy something and paste it into a .py file, some of the characters may not be copied correctly. Given below is the error Python usually spews out when that happens: Continue reading “Non-ASCII Character Syntax Error In Python”
What Is The Poincaré Conjecture?
Before we start, let me put something out there. Poincaré Conjecture is one of the seven millennium problems established by the Clay Mathematics Institute. Those problems are worth a million dollars each! The Poincaré conjecture depends on the mind-numbing problem of understanding the shapes of spaces. This field of study is referred to as “topology” by mathematicians. Topology is an important field within mathematics concerned with the study of shapes, spaces and surfaces. We interact with these in our everyday lives. We see surfaces breaking and shapes getting deformed all the time. Ever wondered if there is any law governing these deformations? Or are these deformations just too random to be studied? Does Poincaré Conjecture have any real world applications? Continue reading “What Is The Poincaré Conjecture?”
The Ramifications Of H.265
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) recently approved the next generation video format known as H.265, which would be the successor to the current H.264 standard. H.265, also informally known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is supposed to be twice as efficient as H.264 in terms of compression. H.265 relies on the fact that processing power is increasing on our devices, and uses more processing power to achieve better compression. Now how will this affect our lives? Is this just an algorithmic improvement or will it have a tangible impact? Continue reading “The Ramifications Of H.265”
Where Does Myspace Stand After The Redesign?
Myspace recently revamped its website completely. Unfortunately, the unveiling coincided with Facebook’s big announcement about Graph Search. So obviously Myspace got overshadowed! It still managed to generate some buzz, but where exactly is Myspace heading with this? They took too much time to come up with a redesigned site and social networking domain has become too crowded now. Is there any hope for yet another social network to survive? Continue reading “Where Does Myspace Stand After The Redesign?”
Investors Are Unimpressed By Facebook’s Graph Search
Facebook unveiled its graph search recently. This announcement was highly anticipated and Facebook is banking on it to generate some revenue. While it is very good from a technological point of view, the unveiling didn’t exactly impress the investors. The stock prices actually went down after the announcement. Facebook really wants to create a source to generate sustainable revenues. What exactly are the investors looking for? Even though graph search looks promising, why aren’t the investors convinced yet? Continue reading “Investors Are Unimpressed By Facebook’s Graph Search”
Expectation Maximization
Probabilistic models are commonly used to model various forms of data, including physical, biological, seismic, etc. Much of their popularity can be attributed to the existence of efficient and robust procedures for learning parameters from observations. Often, however, the only data available for training a probabilistic model are incomplete. Missing values can occur which will not be sufficient to get the model. For example, in medical diagnosis, patient histories generally include results from a limited battery of tests. In gene expression clustering, incomplete data arise from the intentional omission of gene-to-cluster assignments in the probabilistic model. If we use regular techniques to estimate the underlying model, then we will get a wrong estimate. What do we do in these situations? Continue reading “Expectation Maximization”
Robot Vs Turing
In one of my previous blog posts, we discussed about measuring computer’s intelligence and how we can use the Turing test for it. After Turing proposed that test, a lot of people realized its importance and started working on it. People really wanted to believe that machines are indeed capable of thinking. We need a way to determine if a computer is thinking on its own. The biggest obstacle here is that this is a very subjective topic. Given the knowledge that something is indeed a machine, how do we ascertain that the machine is capable of thinking? Continue reading “Robot Vs Turing”
The Clairvoyant Curves Of Pursuit
Let’s say you see a rogue fighter aircraft on your territory and you want to demolish it. Well, not you per se, but a person who is in charge of these things! Anyway, you send your pilot so that he can chase the aircraft and destroy it. But how will he determine the path of his aircraft so that it takes the shortest path? Bear in mind that the target is moving. If the target moves in a straight line, this is a pretty simple problem. But it almost never happens in real life. Also, if you chase the target but arrive there in a vulnerable position, you might get attacked by the target itself. You need to arrive there in time and also in an offensive position. How do we solve this? Continue reading “The Clairvoyant Curves Of Pursuit”
What Do You Know About Infinity?
What do you think of the term “infinity”? In layman’s terms, infinity is something that has no end, something that is bigger than all the things we know. This is what most people think! Many people who have not seen advanced mathematics do not know about the fact that there are many different types of infinity, some of which are bigger than others. Now how is that possible? Isn’t there just one single infinity which quantifies the essence of uncountability? Continue reading “What Do You Know About Infinity?”
Perpetual Enigma 