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AlphaZero Chess: Computers Will Think Differently from Humans, Letting them Outperform Us (on Many Tasks)
Albert Wenger – Dec 11, 2017
Planes fly differently from birds. Cars move differently from horses. And computers think differently from humans. That had always been my assumption but if you needed more proof, Google’s AlphaZero program, which had previously shown novel ways of playing Go, [...] Read more
The Quest for a Stable Coin
Albert Wenger – Dec 8, 2017
One of the objections against crypto currencies has been their volatility. Bitcoin for instance just rose by about 60% over 2 days only to then fall by about 15% in a matter of hours. Steam just ended bitcoin support citing [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Suppressed Volatility
Albert Wenger – Dec 6, 2017
Last Uncertainty Wednesday provided a recap on our adventures with sample means and what those implied about the difficulties of inference. Now we will look at another equally fascinating complication: inferring volatility. As the title of this initial post gives [...] Read more
What Does it Mean to Be Human?
Albert Wenger – Dec 5, 2017
[This is a talk I was going to give at Slush but had to change my travel plans.] A 12 minute talk should be plenty to address this simple question. Just kidding. This is one of the profound questions that [...] Read more
The Emotional Benefits of Letting your Car Drive You
Albert Wenger – Nov 27, 2017
Over the holiday day weekend I did a lot of driving in a loaner Tesla (we have ordered one ourselves but it is, ahem, delayed). Well, actually, the car did a lot of the driving. I made extensive use of [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Pay Extra to Read (Or Fight to Protect Net Neutrality)
Albert Wenger – Nov 22, 2017
Just imagine for a moment the world we can easily find ourselves in. You love my series of blog posts called “Uncertainty Wednesday” but when you try to access it instead of seeing the content, you receive a notice from [...] Read more
Wenger Design: Men’s Wear
Albert Wenger – Nov 20, 2017
I have mentioned here on Continuations before that we have been home schooling our children. The main reason for doing so is to give them plenty of time to pursue their interests. Interest that over time can deepen into passions [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d)
Albert Wenger – Nov 15, 2017
Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution. Here is a plot (narrowed down to the [...] Read more
Call Your Senators to Preserve Equity Compensation for Startups
Albert Wenger – Nov 13, 2017
The latest Senate version of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” has a stab in the eye for startups. It proposes to tax certain stock options and RSUs at the time of vesting. An earlier House version also contained this [...] Read more