Far from supporting Searle’s conclusion, the Chinese Room is actually a very good argument for emergent qualities in physical systems like intelligence or consciousness. The philosopher John Searle created a thought experiment to show that no computer can ever be said to have a mind or be conscious. By extension…

We cannot decide whether humans have free will because we experience time as monotonic. This fact, surprisingly, also undermines the credibility of scientific experiments. If we argue that the human mind is like a computer, or a physical system in general, we will encounter the counter-argument of having free will…

Neural networks are supersets of linear and logistic regressions. Use Keras to quickly and efficiently build regression models and switch between them and neural networks as needed. — If you are tasked with creating a prediction for some measure, you may wonder whether a simple linear or multiple regression would be sufficient (or, in case we want to predict a binary value, logistic regression), or perhaps use a neural network. And how much coding would be involved in…

It all started when Base II (there had been no contact with Base I for some years by then), so when Base II decided that we should go and see what Europans would do if we tried to take some of their stone. I guess the Allies knew the answer…

While working on extending a web templating system to support a new programming language, I collected some features I wanted to implement or preserve. …

Machine learning and neural networks are used more and more widely, despite the fact that they mostly function as black boxes, and we have little insight into how they generate their output. This makes it difficult to scrutinize and account for decisions made using these systems. In this note I…

Introduction This note offers practical ideas to team leaders and managers who suddenly find themselves organizing the work of and managing their team remotely and are not entirely sure where to start. The coronavirus pandemic means that many of us are now asked to work from our homes. However, for…