At a quick glance: 32 is greater than 10. 31/32 is about 0.96875, not near pi ~ 3.141593. 31/10 = 3.1 is a worse approximation of pi than 22/7 ~ 3.142857.

One of the bigger risks of iterative statistical or machine learning fitting procedures is over-fit or the dreaded data leak. Over-fit is when: a model performs better on training data than on future data. Some degree of over-fit is expected. A data leak is when: the model learns things about […]

I have a new “crazy theorists” article up: “Working Through A Trivial Algorithm Whose Analysis Isn’t.” It is my notes on reading through Jonassen and Knuth’s amazing 1978 article analyzing 2 to 3 node search trees. You would think there couldn’t be a lot to that. But there is! I […]

I have a new video demonstrating the Kelly Can’t Fail betting strategy. The idea is: this is a classroom appropriate tool for discussing allocating assets in the presence of risk. The usual Kelly betting on coin-flips is too high variance to expect successful classroom demonstrations. However, the zero variance card […]