[HN Gopher] Markov Chains for programmers
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       Markov Chains for programmers
        
       Author : raister
       Score  : 133 points
       Date   : 2022-04-01 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (czekster.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (czekster.github.io)
        
       | raister wrote:
       | Interesting find - really introductory examples. Good read,
       | recommend it.
        
       | westcort wrote:
       | I have used Markov chains for a few fun projects, like this
       | Markov chain headline generator
       | (https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Headlines.html), and a Markov
       | generator based on a certain someone's Twitter feed
       | (https://locserendipity.com/Markov_Trump.html), but this looks
       | like a good resources for more serious applications.
        
       | b20000 wrote:
       | it's for programmers but comes with matlab code and excel sheets
        
         | Jtsummers wrote:
         | Nothing wrong with either of those. Also, if you take the time
         | to check out the book or its GitHub repo, then you will see
         | that there is also C code and C "challenges" (projects) for the
         | reader to go through.
        
       | hvasilev wrote:
       | There are just so many of these fun AI-related concepts that seem
       | really cool and you get the chill that they will take over the
       | world some day.
       | 
       | Decades pass and you realize they either have little to no
       | application or are incredibly niche :(
       | 
       | Too bad that "solution in a search of a problem" is generally bad
       | approach to problem-solving. I wish our industry was more fun as
       | a whole.
        
         | robbedpeter wrote:
         | Most of the time, these things are resource hogs arriving way
         | before their time to shine, either needing Moore's law to catch
         | up the hardware, or some nerd to wrestle with the combinatorial
         | explosion and win. Transformers can be seen as a variation on
         | Markov chains, but the innovation of attention mechanisms means
         | you can use hundreds of thousands of tokens and thousands of
         | tokens in sequences without the problem space going all Buzz
         | Lightyear on you.
         | 
         | https://www.zabaware.com/ultrahal/
         | 
         | Ultra Hal was a best in class chat bot when fixed response
         | systems like Alice/ AIML were the standard. Ultra Hal used
         | Markov chains and some clever pruning, but it dealt with a few
         | hundred tokens as words and sequences only 2 or 3 tokens out.
         | It occasionally produced novel and relevant output, like a
         | really shitty gpt-2.
         | 
         | I think we may see a resurgence of expert systems soon, as
         | gpt-3 and transformers have proved capable of automating rule
         | creation in systems like Cyc. They've already incorporated
         | direct lookups into static databases gpt / RETRO type models.
         | Incorporating predicate logic inference engines seems like the
         | logical and potent next step. GPT could serve as a personality
         | and process engine that eliminates the flaw (tedium) in
         | massive, tedious, human level micro-tasking systems from GOFAI.
         | 
         | It's worth going through all the literature all the way back to
         | the 1956 summer of code and hunt for ideas that just didn't
         | work _yet_.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop
        
         | Fomite wrote:
         | ...Markov Chains (via MCMC) underly most Bayesian inference
         | problems, and pretty much all stochastic dynamical systems
         | models are based on Markov Chains.
        
         | klysm wrote:
         | Markov chain Monte Carlo is incredibly useful and widely
         | applied.
        
           | vanderZwan wrote:
           | To give an example: Prediction by Partial Matching is
           | basically a Markov chain in disguise, and an incredibly
           | powerful way to do compression that beats most other forms of
           | text compression (at the price of having a lot more memory
           | overhead)
           | 
           | [0]
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_by_partial_matching
        
       | m000 wrote:
       | - "Markov Chains for programmers." Cool!
       | 
       | - Opens PDF.
       | 
       | - Typeset in Computer Modern.
       | 
       | - Starts running, screaming in Comic Sans.
       | 
       | Jokes aside, CM is not the only game for math-heavy documents.
       | Something like Libertinus [1] would probably be more screen-
       | friendly.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/alerque/libertinus
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | This has been downvoted, but I think selecting more screen-
         | friendly fonts is a valid concern nowadays. Personally I would
         | also like to see a reflowable format (which I guess would mean
         | HTML with MathJax).
        
           | mattalex wrote:
           | Use latexml this is what's running under the hood of ar5iv
           | https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/ and should be able to compile
           | every Latex document to html
        
         | spekcular wrote:
         | What's wrong with computer modern?
        
         | dddnzzz334 wrote:
         | Computer Modern is the best looking font
        
       | jonititan wrote:
       | Pymc3 is pretty good. https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-01 23:01 UTC)