How Many Chess Games are Possible? Here is a fun question: how many different games of chess are possible? Counting the number of possible chess games is quite hard, as the numbers are large and chess board positions can be quite complicated. In this note we will try to estimate […]
Mixed populations make correctly measuring price elasticity (the response of sales to price changes) difficult. In fact, standard methods often mis-price. In our latest screencast we show Bayesian methods and Stan can actually “un-mix” such populations and correctly infer price elasticity. This allows for much better price experiment outcomes.
ACM not only hides publicly funded NSF research behind a firewall, even citing it is a premium feature.
Please check out Nina Zumel’s video on how to use Tobit-style methods (and Stan!) to model market demand from censored observations such as capped or limited sales.
I’ve been worrying a bit over the philosophy of creation and dissemination in the era of LLMs (large language models). I feel we are overly impressed with the byproduct or even the bycatch. LLMs do complete some tasks, write code, and produce superficially convincing texts. In my opinion, this is […]
Our group has written many times on how classification training prevalence affects model fitting. Tailored Models are Not The Same as Simple Corrections The Shift and Balance Fallacies Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier Performance? The Intercept Fallacy Don’t Use Classification Rules for Classification Problems The upshot is: we feel re-balancing […]
I would like to write a bit about text. That is: technical writing, legal briefs, or even an opinion piece such as this note. Such writings make up much of our society and form a “marketplace of ideas.” Texts are now very cheap to produce using large language models (LLMs). […]
Sabine Hossenfelder’s video “Odds Are The Universe is Full Of Intelligent Life, Mathematician Finds” recently pointed out a new paper on the Fermi paradox: Antal Veres “The solitude zone: A probabilistic window for singular lifeform existence”, Acta Astronautica Volume 238, Part A, January 2026, Pages 1137-1145. Initially I was a […]
I really feel this advertisement has “said the quiet part out loud.” “One day you won’t have to assemble the entire creative team for every little request. Are they all wearing hats?” Image and text copyright Adobe 2025 (reproduced here for comment and review). Yup, not only are your human […]
Introduction There is a thesis that high dimensional optimization is easy, and it is only our low dimensional intuition that is holding progress back. I’d like to try and explain why that isn’t quite the case. The background Some of the rigorous work on the nature of stationary and critical […]