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 […]

Recently I’ve been producing (for my own amusement) example Curta calculations. One motivation was arguing if a proposed solution method for Dudeney’s digits problem was something that could in fact have been easily executed in 1924. This got me thinking, is there an actual difference between calculation and computation? In […]