Month: November 2012

Sparse Grokking

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Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame shows up in the New York Times hawking his Grok for Big Data predictions. Interestingly, if one drills down into the details of Grok, we see once again that randomized sparse representations are the core of the system. That is, if we assign symbols random representational vectors that are sparse, we can sum the vectors for co-occurring symbols and, following J.R. Firth’s pithy “words shall be known by the company that they keep” start to develop a theory of meaning that would not offend Wittgenstein.

Is there anything new to Hawkins’ effort? For certain types of time-series prediction, the approach parallels artificial neural network designs, replacing the complexity of shifting, multi-epoch training regimens that, in effect, build the high-dimensional distances between co-occurring events by gradually moving time-correlated data together and uncorrelated data apart with an end-run around all the computational complexity. But then there is Random Indexing, which I’ve previously discussed, here. If one restricts Random Indexing to operating on temporal patterns, or on spatial patterns, then the results start to look like Numenta’s offering.

While there is a bit of opportunism in Hawkins latching onto Big Data to promote an application of methods he has been working on for years, there are very real opportunities for trying to mine leading indicators to help with everything from ecommerce to research and development. Many flowers will bloom, grok, die, and be reborn.… Read the rest

Bats and Belfries

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Thomas Nagel proposes a radical form of skepticism in his new book, Minds and Cosmos, continuing his trajectory through subjective experience and moral realism first began with bats zigging and zagging among the homunculi of dualism reimagined in the form of qualia. The skepticism involves disputing materialistic explanations and proposing, instead, that teleological ones of an unspecified form will likely apply, for how else could his subtitle that paints the “Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature” as likely false hold true?

Nagel is searching for a non-religious explanation, of course, because just enervating nature through fiat is hardly an explanation at all; any sort of powerful, non-human entelechy could be gaming us and the universe in a non-coherent fashion. But what parameters might support his argument? Since he apparently requires a “significant likelihood” argument to hold sway in support of the origins of life, for instance, we might imagine what kind of thinking could result in highly likely outcomes that begin with inanimate matter and lead to goal-directed behavior while supporting a significant likelihood of that outcome. The parameters might involve the conscious coordination of the events leading towards the emergence of goal-directed life, thus presupposing a consciousness that is not our own. We are back then to our non-human entelechy looming like an alien or like a strange creator deity (which is not desirable to Nagel). We might also consider the possibility that there are properties to the universe itself that result in self-organization and that either we don’t yet know or that we are only beginning to understand. Elliot Sober’s critique suggests that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics results in what I might call “patterned” behavior while not becoming “goal-directed” per se.… Read the rest

Pressing Snobs into Hell

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Paul Vitanyi has been a deep advocate for Kolmogorov complexity for many years. His book with Ming Li, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, remains on my book shelf (and was a bit of an investment in grad school).

I came across a rather interesting paper by Vitanyi with Rudi Cilibrasi called “Clustering by Compression” that illustrates perhaps more easily and clearly than almost any other recent work the tight connections between meaning, repetition, and informational structure. Rather than describing the paper, however, I wanted to conduct an experiment that demonstrates their results. To do this, I asked the question: are the writings of Dante more similar to other writings of Dante than to Thackeray? And is the same true of Thackeray relative to Dante?

Now, we could pursue these questions at many different levels. We might ask scholars, well-versed in the works of each, to compare and contrast the two authors. They might invoke cultural factors, the memes of their respective eras, and their writing styles. Ultimately, though, the scholars would have to get down to some textual analysis, looking at the words on the page. And in so doing, they would draw distinctions by lifting features of the text, comparing and contrasting grammatical choices, word choices, and other basic elements of the prose and poetry on the page. We might very well be able to take parts of the knowledge of those experts and distill it into some kind of a logical procedure or algorithm that would parse the texts and draw distinctions based on the distributions of words and other structural cues. If asked, we might say that a similar method might work for the so-called language of life, DNA, but that it would require a different kind of background knowledge to build the analysis, much less create an algorithm to perform the same task.… Read the rest