Everything is prediction. Compression is truth. Teleonomy is the new teleology. I’m working on wondermentation. It is of arguable utility to create pithy little epigrams and nonce phrases as markers to different phases of one’s life, but they began to accumulate as graduate school ground down towards a soft landing at Stanford. My studies and research started to get lively towards the end of my undergrad degree with an assistanceship in the Advanced Computing Laboratory. Machine learning and evolutionary computation were my favored areas of interest and I supported my core studies with evolutionary biology, ethology, analytic philosophy and mathematics.

I felt I had crossed a Rubicon late in my senior year at Cornell as I worked on a fundamental challenge in learning patterns directly from data—so-called unsupervised learning and knowledge acquisition. The problem posed as a kind of Manichaean mystery to me, divided between treating every single data point as a singularity and similarly considering them all as a unified whole. Between the two poles was compromise meted out by co-occurrence priorities; events close together in time and space deserved capture as a statistical regularity.

The threshold question was what form that acquisition algorithm could take on that would lead to an efficient coding of the data into a predictive model. The answer was found in an elliptical foray through the fundamentals of mathematics and computing, then straight into the heart of evolutionary thinking. I did not really emerge from it, either. There was a small eureka moment with a gradual fading of interest as summer hit and I was back in Santa Fe after graduating, waiting for my Masters program to kick-off. It stayed with me and I carried a small notebook around, feverishly scribbling notes while once again wandering up those arroyos towards the ruddy canyons above.… Read the rest