simplest

At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo Kakutani told him that during the cold war, “for about a month everybody at Yale worked on it, with no result. A similar phenomenon happened when I mentioned it at the University of Chicago. A joke was made that this problem was part of a conspiracy to slow down mathematical research in the U.S.”The Collatz conjecture—the vexing…

Have you ever found yourself waiting in line at a supermarket, a restaurant, or a bank, wishing your turn would come just a bit faster?Continue reading on Towards Data Science » Have you ever found yourself waiting in line at a supermarket, a restaurant, or a bank, wishing your turn would come just a bit faster?Continue reading on Towards Data Science » FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each…

How to implement PSOPhoto by James Wainscoat on UnsplashBefore talking about swarms and particles, let’s briefly discuss optimization itself. Basically, optimization is the process of finding the minima or maxima of some function. For instance, when you need to get to your office ASAP and think about which way is the fastest, you’re optimizing your route (in this case it’s a function). In math, there are literally hundreds of ways of optimization, and among them a sub-group called nature-inspired exists.Nature-inspired…

In 2017 Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist who directs the Climate Action Unit at University College London, ran the opening session of a conference on decision-making under uncertainty for an audience of scientists, finance professionals and policy makers. He divided them into groups of six and gave them questions and activities centered on their personal and professional experiences of risk. After a while, some hands went up. “They said, ‘We just realized we cannot agree on the definitions of risk and uncertainty,’” De…

Single-celled life forms need just the simplest of evolutionary footholds to get a leg up in their environment.Even an extremely minimal cell that contains just 493 genes can mutate and adapt to improve its fitness, researchers say – a critical step in the persistence and stability of life that has now been demonstrated in the laboratory.The insights come from a new study by a team of researchers from the US and Brazil, which stripped a cell of all but its essential genes to see if it could still evolve.The cell is an…

Are there two people in the world who are equally hairy? Contrary to what you might expect, this statement can be answered with a resounding yes, even without statistical analysis. For this, you need nothing more than the “pigeonhole principle,” also called “Dirichlet’s principle.” It sounds almost ridiculously simple: if you want to divide n objects among k drawers, and there are more objects than drawers (n > k), then several objects end up in the same drawer. This simple statement, which sounds more like common…

Image: Photo: Shutterstock Graphics: Vicky LetaGames are a bottomless reservoir of puzzle inspiration. This is because games and puzzles both tend to be founded on a concise set of logical rules. This week’s puzzle concerns one of the simplest strategy games ever devised: tic-tac-toe. Don’t feel too assured, though. You may be a tic-tac-toe expert, but have you ever tried to play it backwards?Did you miss last week’s puzzle? Check it out here, and find its solution at the bottom of today’s article. Be careful not to read…

Pros Easy installation Low price Reliably responsive Solar panel included Cons Visually noticeable Needs separate hub to be truly smart SwitchBot has found its niche in retrofitting existing home appliances and products, such as door locks, to make them smart. And now the company is making a blind tilt mechanism with an included solar panel that automates window blinds for you. This smart SwitchBot Blind TiltIt's a small device that attaches to the vertical twisting wand on horizontal blinds, and twists it to tilt…

Set up and deploy a database, an ETL server, and automated reporting from scratch in a few hours all from your laptop.The unbundling of analytics and database tools is creating massive confusion in the market.Businesses want simple, impactful reporting and analytics but the journey from ‘I need analytics’ to actually getting it has become more challenging to navigate over the last several years.Photo by Negative Space: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-and-green-pie-chart-97080/Fortunately, I’ve personally built dozens of…

How hard can it be to teach a machine to generate a single pointPhoto by Jonathan Borba on UnsplashThis article describes the creation of a Generator — Discriminator pair, that would be consistent and robust (more or less). What’s more, I aimed to get a specific Discriminator function, which would ensure the Generator’s consistent learning (see plot below).The task for the simplest GAN would be to generate a point. A single number, say “1.” The Generator would be a single neuron with one weight and one bias value. Thus,…