Conversations With Fire

I wrote to you and You,

unexpectedly;
wrote back to me.

Arose a tide of overnight love;
three years in the making,
Bewildered, scared; unprepared,
I sat with my heart pounding, aching.

All this while seeing things as I do,
Not seeing, the sight You had too.
I approach to bask in Dragon flame,
the inferno itself, knew me only by name.

Holding on to, what of You;
rebuilt from memory, I now remember.
Unnoticed; until I do,
my every act seeks You,
like ash seek'th ember.

Zeus's spark, when I approached,
For evermore to stay near the blaze,
My blizzard bitten bones to blame,
the blessed ignited, broke the gaze.

So I'll stay beyond your silent fence,
Throw a rock your way, now and then.
in hope that you'll find the ore;
sometime years and decades hence.

When you do; look beyond your moat.
You'll find a man, still strung to the name,
Held by death, or still drawing breath.
warm from; to your flare, his claim.

A claim he lays, now steeped in longing and desire,
to conversations he had once held with Fire.

When You Are the Problem

When you begin to hear what the people around you are saying and perhaps begin to arrive at the conclusion that maybe what you are doing is not right and that maybe those who taught you everything in life are wrong. Very wrong about quiet a few things.

I am the problem. It's a devastating blow when you arrive at this conclusion on your own. The rot in society that I have wholeheartedly cursed is in me.

It's a strange position to be in. You begin to look back and try to look for the source of this behavior as if trying to blame someone/something else for it. The first stage is always disbelief. I refused to accept that I was wrong on a moral level.

Slowly as you notice the evidence of your nature, you begin to lament since you have become the demon you condemned so little a while back with so much empty venom. I like to compare life then to that of Ravan. All of your thoughts are suddenly arriving from heads that you do would not like to call your own. In situations the first thoughts you have are those you need to condemn. It is hell, or as close to that as can be. Knowing that you are the problem.

Over time though it eases off. You begin to notice that you no longer do the things you used to do. You now have an understanding of the nature of your thoughts. That you can and probably will be wrong in the future. You catch yourself asking again and again "Who am I to say so?". I was inevitably drawn to science due to this. There was a safety in knowing how much it is that you don't know and how sure you can be of certain things. Yet you demolish your own thoughts in the light of this finding. You begin to rely on surer things like logic.

You begin to notice the true nature of your memories. They are fickle shape shifters constantly changing to appease the current you to such an extent that you can only be sure of the facts you can wring out of them and even those needing confirmation. Some suddenly become hateful remembrances of instances. Most of them contain you and oh you have not been the saint you thought you were. The only solace you have is in the fact that you have the will to change.

You begin to be subject to Reverse Culture Shock. You begin to realize that potentially, there are only a few places where your demon could have been birthed. You can name each place. It is too late however. You witness the young being fed this poison and do nothing because you are afraid.

You are still not strong enough to refute this beast which until so recently and perhaps even now, resides in your own mind. You are weak and you lash yourself for this weakness, knowing that your silence is all it takes for this ugly existence to grow. Yet you keep the silence because you now know that it was this squall which secured your position in society and that years of living with this in your mind has made you so terribly frail that you would not survive it's cleaving from one's self.

You hate yourself for your actions. You repent your deeds. Perhaps if change smiles upon you, you get to ask for forgiveness. You spend your days knowing that your actions have supported a system which is wrong. The German citizen lending support to Hitler no longer seems incredulous to you. On some level, you understand how it could have happened and you pray that it did not happen that way because it would show you a sight which would scorch your soul.

You know things. You know, and you can never forget them. That is the curse of knowledge, for if ignorance is bliss the is not knowledge pain? They are constantly there at the fore of your mind, coloring your experiences and marking the schools of thought in people. Turning otherwise happy moments into objects of deep sadness and rage. You begin to generalize and then quickly correct yourself. You begin to find it difficult to love and hate people. People are no longer so simple. You surprise yourself at not being angry at things which would have enraged your earlier self. You begin to question views of your own which are too absolute to be true. You begin to realize that objectivity is after all, manufactured. You begin to take philosophy seriously and wonder why you took so long.

A line from a beautiful song comes to mind. Perhaps only when you are the problem, it is the easiest to fix. Finding out that you are the problem is hard; and painful. No wonder we live in a world difficult to change. I'll leave you with a line from a song that was introduced to me not so long ago.

"Black is white the other way, paradise is in the gray"

Vehicles in Rajasthan

I was perusing https://data.gov.in once more and my thoughts turned back to my home state of Rajasthan. A quick search revealed that the site does indeed host data on Rajasthan (see this).

We take up the motor vehicle registration data provided on the site and immediately discover that like all the data on the site, this dataset is not prepared for consumption. We shall have to perform some data cleaning.

A few Excel copy pastes later we have a single file which I've put up on my Google Drive here.

With that I loaded this stuff into a Jupyter notebook and got this neat plot as the end product of some nifty manipulations.  The entire notebook is available here (I'll upload this soon).

First let's take a look at the New Registrations in every vehicle Type over the years.

Everyone seems to be buying two wheelers in Rajasthan! Cars and Tractors are the next big wigs but they stand no where close to where two wheelers are.

 Irrespective of vehicle class, there is growth in motor vehicles in Rajasthan as can be seen in this Point plot. We can see that what has caused the explosion in vehicle numbers is within the non-transport class of vehicles.

We can see that it's just one outlier which has caused this boost! What is that? We know that it has always been high in registrations. It's probably the motorcycles. It's curious that the total shoots up so quickly in 2012 but the growth is generally increasing. Let's see if the data has mistakes in it. We plot the total counts reported over the years and then we plot the cumulative sum of the new registrations.

That's strange.

New registrations for a year should contribute to the next year's total. Since we don't have data before 2005, we should expect the difference between reported numbers and expected numbers to be constant.

That difference changes. It changes abruptly in 2012 going from massively underreported to over reported. An effect of the Aadhaar card wherein people suddenly started reporting unregistered vehicles? Perhaps vehicles came in from other states. I don't know if that is counted as a new registration or not. It's either that or our government is bad at reporting / collecting statistics.

Attendance in St. Stephen's College

I've been hunting around for datasets I can relate to for some time now. This fine evening I arrived on the conclusion that I could simply use attendance data from the website of St Stephen's College.

The complete analysis notebook is available as a gist (here's the gist).

Collecting the data was a matter of inspecting how the website was obtaining it's data. A company has been handling our attendance since the beginning it seems. (GreenClouds site link). As far as I'm concerned they've made a mess of the data transfer as I can see. Perhaps it originated in the college itself, perhaps it's due to some mistakes on the company level. Whatever the cause the data format is a mess.

I open up my console and spin up a Python script to get the data from the college website. Takes about two minutes on my Internet connection to collect all the information.

We then proceed to put it in a nice tabular form with columns being Name, percent LA, percent TA, percent PA, admission_year, course.

Things are now ready for graphing.

Graphs

We go on to make Box plots. If you were to line up people in order of their attendance you would get a box plot. The person in the middle of the line is the line cutting the box in the middle. It shows that there are an equal number of people on either side of the line.

You cut each part of the line in half again and you get the bounds of the box.

This one is a gem. What is up with Chem! The attendance of their Lectures is absolutely ridiculous. While everyone more or less has the same attendance in a course Chem people are all over the attendance spectrum! Then again, their Tutorials box plot is neat too!

Yes. I see it too. Math people are consistently in class with a few people as outliers. Nobody else has this kind of spread. 

Perhaps a better way of seeing this would be violin plots where you get to see the density of the people instead of simple boxes. The thickness of the violin denotes how many people people are at that point.

For example we can see that a lot of the math  people are high attendance junkies and a substantial amount of CHE, PHY, PCH and, PCS are low attendance lovers.

There! The average PHI student absolutely does not give a hoot about attendance! The PCH and PCS programs do every class together as is apparent from their spreads. ENG and HST do compete with PHI but PHI does take the cake.

Let's move on to the simplest of all graphs. The Histogram. No explanation needed here.

Looking at the histograms we can see that almost everyone attends class with the exception of a few people who absolutely don't come to class. Perhaps people who left the course and the administration just did not remove them from roll calls? What about experience?

We do a regular point plot to see change in attendance over months. The vertical lines along the points denote a 95% confidence interval.

The third years have found that perfect balance of leisurely attendance during most of the semester and then picking it up during the last months. First years exhibit that trait of a "नया नया मौलवी" perfectly. Second years have figured out that attendance does not really matter, but are still to find out how badly those marks can affect their marks. With time comes wisdom,

That's it for now. I'd love to do some more if someone can come up with data at a lower granularity.

Rain

As I walk out of my room, I am greeted by this winter rain. A soft spray of cold water caresses my jaw while I move along the balcony, as if to cajole me into joining it in it's emotion.

The wind whips up the beads of sweat born from seasons past into a frenzy so great they conceive ghosts of the land crashing against buildings as though to reclaim the earth which is now vertical against it's wishes. The forest in front of me is awash, blushing it's beauty with the rain washing away all that made it forget who it was.

A part of this torrent is caught in my neighbor's rooftop. The thousand droplet soldiers march to the steady drum of the drainpipe relieving itself on the tin sheet placed under it. The sky is painted blue with the deep color that only clouds with filled bellies can bring. A tinge of red peaks out behind the horizon as if to catch one last glimpse of this scene before going to bed.

Humans scurry about their shelters, filling up containers with what I have to spare. The smoke rises from their mounds and meets my gift halfway, mixing and mating with it until it falls back on land not gift and not smoke anymore. Humans. I've watched them since the beginning of time and as a people, they have watched me too. They have inspired in me emotion from time to time and so have I in them.

We are all prisoners, together in this walled reality of capability. What is, can. Thus the both of us trapped, beautiful things.

Good but not Great

People are usually good, and rarely great. Most of us live in a story where we have no defining purpose. A story following a path as simple as the thousand tendrils of a tree, taken root for a century or two. A purpose which so drives us, that a single word may define most of what we are made up of. Most people are good folk. They hear no evil, they see no evil and do no evil. They also hear no good, see no good and do no good. They are for all intents and purposes simply there to fill space and "exist". In the immortal words of wise men of the past,

There are those who change according to circumstances and those who do not. All progress must then be left to those who refuse to adapt, as they are those who impose their will on nature.

Some however strive to be outliers. They notice things and act on them. They are the ones who do not apologize for their opinions and those who do not fear their own actions. These are the great. The great however, are rarely also good. The good shy away from change as a touch-me-not from one's skin. When the great force it upon them, the great are painted in colours belonging to shades of evil. Rarely does a change yield immediate results and so rarely are the great also seen as good.

The good are just as important as the great in determining the world's fate. The difference is that the good determine it by their inaction and incompetency, and the great do it by their action. It takes monumental will or addiction to make a great out of a good.

The Obsession With The Best

A common kind of question I've been encountering now a days is "What is the best X for task Y?". This is encouraging at first sight since it conveys an intent of the questioner in the direction of wanting to complete task Y.

This desire to do some task, however weak or strong, is in itself a commendable achievement. However, the question reveals a deeper problem within the seeker's mind. They have equated the best tools with the best results. It is a classic case of "A good workman does not blame his tools" emerging as a bad workman depends only on his tools.

Instead of focusing on what tool is best for a job, a person should rather be concerned with what is the bare minimum needed to get started with the task. With learning comes the understanding that some tool X is good for task Y only when person Z is using it. It's probably useless in your hands.

Last Man Standing

When men collide in the ring
The body is the first to go.

What keeps them up, fighting
Is their will, "not yet! no!"

Yet, what keeps me going,
are my fears, "Atelophobia. Go!"

In this fight betwix life and me,
Will nor fear, shall guide.

What will define moi, in this ring,
with all will and fears banding.

Is that with all my soul!
I want to be the last man standing.

Recurse

Uninvited, shoved into life,
somewhere someone snuffed someone alike.

Some years then, she was taught,
about all of society's beautiful rot.
Imbibed into her, the rules
of ancient men, nay, absolute fools.

Mind chained by religion and common talk,
she mends and strengthens her own padlock.

A place so lonely not even tears come by,
the one's she's raised, she's raised in tie.

Her blood and flesh, in store for worse,
unknowingly will, this verse recurse.

The Programmer

Fingers raced, soul ablaze.
Beauty birthed, from sweaty gaze.

Witnesses sighed, as it all came together,
off the board and into the theater.

Acclaim echoed, what dexterous fingers!
How subtly, on this verse she lingers!

The master played, by the strain, roused.
She played knowingly, to a deaf house.

Simple Harmonic Motion

It's just a reaction, I don't really want this.
The hormones are acting up, that's all it is.

If I just ignore it, the chemicals will go away.
There is no meaning in this, yearn as I may.

It has happened before, nothing is new.
Time and again, I have begun to love you.

Others have stood in your place.
Yet you are the only familiar face.

Perchance something more it is.
This recurrent return, I think I really love you miss.

A Better Picture of Graduation

Just thought that since everyone goes about quoting graduation marks without realizing how misrepresented they are, here is my graduation with all the tests on record.

Practicals + Theory + Internals

Why You Should Code

Every day, every second now, we are immersed in a world where dumb machines work for us. To list the obvious, your phones, TV, desktop, watch and, laptop are all computers. In the not so obvious list come power plants, rockets, cars, water supply, GPS, and, the post office. Despite living in this obviously computer driven world very few people know how to code. So I'm going to tell you why I code, in an effort to get you to pick up yourself and get going.

Programming at it's heart is communication. You instruct the machine. You tell it what to do, your desires, the things you don't like, the things you want more of, the things you want done quickly. You tell the machine what it is that you want done. In those moments of history, you are God. You can instruct the machine to anything and it will obey. It will obey in a manner you never thought possible.

There will be no complaint, no groans. There will be no raised eyebrows. You have a powerful ally at your command. You can designate repetitive tasks to it and it will do them till the end of time itself. You can assign some intelligent tasks to it and it will do them till the end of time. What the machine does is up to you.

The first problem I solved was downloading YouTube videos. I knew I wanted this entire play list and I did not want to go on clicking anymore. So I wrote a program for it and the machine obediently downloaded the entire play list for me. That is all there is to computing. Nothing fancy, nothing mysterious. Simple communication.

I now solve a lot of problems using my laptop. I have to apply for a PhD. So I write a program to suggest names of PhD guides to me.

There are lots of ways to communicate with the computer. Sure you can use something like Excel to do calculations for you. But in that you are limited to the options that the makers of Excel provide to you. Imagine this like talking to a person with cards. You can only say what is on the cards. Of course you will be limited! On the other hand, the way for unlimited communication is programming languages. Pick any one!

All programming languages are designed with one thing in mind. How can we maximize the things you can communicate to a computer. With a programming language at hand, you can communicate with your computer in an almost unlimited fashion. So learn one.

Try out Python! Try out Matlab( or Octave if you prefer free software like I do)! Try Java or even C!

All these languages allow you to communicate with the computer. All of them are powerful! With an untiring assistant at your beck and call, your life will be a lot simpler.

Guidelines To Cheating In Exams.

Read on with a pinch of salt.

First off let us describe the examination. Here we consider a scenario where candidates sit in a hall and are given some sort of question paper and answer sheets upon which answers must be written.

There are one or more invigilators and they keep the cheating in check. Ok then let's get started.

On an individual level

• This is the ultimate gig. You are a one man army of complete incompetence and are set up to fail but are not prepared to give up on the test yet.
• I admire your spirit but WTF girl(man if you please), you should have studied.Ok, let's see what you can do.
• Before the exam:
• Remember that short term memory is pretty useful in such situations.
• Risk: low
• Use: high
• Volume: low
• Death: you start writing before the writing time.
• Memorize key information. If you do not know what is key ask around (remember that you are in a room full  of people who studied)
• You will forget all of this in due time (it's called short term memory for a reason) but you have about 15 minutes to jot it down on the answer sheet before that. 
• Chits are a classic way to cheat on an exam.
• Risk: low-medium
• Use: high
• Volume: medium-high (depends on writing size)
• Death: If you get caught by an invigilator (more on that later)
• You essentially write stuff down on a piece of paper.
• You hide it somewhere (washroom, your clothes etc)
• You see what is required.
• You dispose it (throw it from a window, eat it ?)
• Environment tampering
• Risk: high
• Use: medium
• Volume: low
• Death: If anyone sees it you are done for
• Involves writing things on walls, desks etc instead of paper as in the chit model.
• I would prefer a better model of cheating.
• During the Exam:
• You had time and you did nothing. If you are reading this you probably tried and failed. Ok, moving on.
• Unless answers come to your mind magically, you will have to ask someone the correct ones.
• I don't know. If you have a good one tell me.
• After the Exam:
• While the paper is in transit.
• Have a genius friend create a copy of answers for you.
• While the paper is in transit to the examination authority, switch the answer sheets in a Mission-Impossible style.
• Pray

With a group

• Now this is a different beast altogether. You have allies!
• Distracting the invigilator:
• The invigilator is human. Meaning he has the same model of attention that everyone else has. Meaning he can be putty in your hands.
• Help me!
• Decide on an initiator and reciprocator among the group.
• Initiator calls the invigilator to her side to clear up a 'misunderstanding' in the paper.
• Everyone else quickly does the dirty while the invigilator is occupied.
• Reciprocator then calls the invigilator to her side and the Initiator then completes her cheating.
• Something strange
• Drop your pencil box, get up suddenly from your seat, ask for extra sheets. In general do something which grabs attention.
• For the rest of the people, while the attention is diverted, exchange info. 
• Keep them walking
• Asking for more sheets is a good way to keep them walking and thus keeping a moving field of attention.
• An invigilator in one place is a dangerous person. they see everything and you do not know where they are seeing.
• Call signs:
• For MCQ type examinations, touching the nose for option 1, ears for option 2 etc are common things to do.
• I have known this to work across 2 different halls.
• Answer sheet circulation:
• Using any of the above methods of distraction, exchange answer sheets between groups.
• Use rules of exchange, thus making sure every one's chances of passing the test are maximized.
• For example, "Pass clockwise"

Those are the things which come to mind off hand. If you have more(I know I have missed a lot) add them in the comments below. Cheers!

Teacher Relative Marking In Schools

Machine learning has brought to my attention the horribly wrong interpretations possible due to data not being on the same scale. When information is not measured by the same stick, the result is that the bigger stick dominates the inferences you draw from the data.

In schooling, standardized testing is a method with good intentions in mind. It enforces the same standards on all the people taking the test. In the context of national education however, I think there might be something that the authorities have missed.

Not every teacher is a great one. I have been fortunate enough to have been taught by good teachers. I have also had the fate of being instructed by absolute teach-shop employees. since on a national scale we would like to measure the learning ability of a child, it would make sense to check if there is anything to be learnt at all where the child is studying.

I propose that along with the students, the teachers also take board exams and so on. Then when the students get their results, their performance is weighed in relation to how good their teacher is.

A student scoring 50/100 when his/her teacher scored 30/100 is a good student. They have learnt a lot. A student scoring 50/100 when the teacher scored 90/100 is not such a good learner.

This would be a more fair scale than every student getting the same paper irrespective of the environment they studied in.

I do realize that this could have potential disasters since the student's performance no longer depends on them only. It would put enormous pressure on the teachers as well since they would effectively keep on taking exams throughout their career.

One potential fallacy is that over time teachers might get exceedingly good at taking tests and thus fail the system altogether. They will learn the common questions and so on. Since subjects are finite in nature at the school level, this is bound to happen. It might result in the teachers getting better at their subjects over time though, I cannot predict this well enough.

To conclude, I say that on the day of the exam, let the teacher sit with the students ad face the music. Then let the students be judged relative to the teacher.

India's Ignorance Towards AI

South Korea broadcasted the AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol nationwide. What happened after the match is now being called the AlphaGo Shock. The machine won 4-1 in a breathtaking battle, often making moves previously unseen in the professional world of competitive Go.

After DeepBlue beat Kasparov in 1997, Go was the game everyone looked up to as the one thing humans were better at. This arose from the astounding complexity of the game. A chess board is an 8x8 grid, a Go board is a 19x19 grid. This, along with the rules of the games makes Go a much more complex game.

As of March 17 2016, South Korea has declared that it will introduce 1 Trillion Won into AI research over the next five years. Go has been a powerful game in the South Korean community since a long time.

The 4-1 game was followed by a spate of newspaper headlines worrying that South Korea was falling behind in a crucial growth industry.

In all this time, the Indian government is yet to publicly embrace AI. We are so blissfully ignorant that not even one of our headlines showed this news. As a Machine Learning student, I understand the implications this might have for India.

While we crown ourselves with titles like "Tech Giant" and so on, the world gleefully moves on to bigger things. We have become the telephone operators of the world while they have moved on to better things.

While the world measures Internet speed in MBps we are still on Mbps (the difference in B and b is significant in case you did not know). While the world is using computers to find significant information and insights from data, we are literally still accounting with pencil paper systems.

While this is not entirely the government's fault a large share is theirs to take. The lack of computer science jobs in the central government is a major drawback. Computer science is no longer a "helper" science used to aid other "real" sciences. It is a titan in it's own right.

The government's refusal to look at this field with an equal eye will harm us in the long run. Take Modi's God-like election victory. That is what Machine Learning does. Modi has seen the power of Machine Learning, yet refuses to acknowledge the work it could do for India.

I am almost inclined to say that like the Lords of old looking at Babbage's difference engine, all Modi can think of is how to use it. To truly understand it's potential we need someone who understands the machine. Someone like Ada of Lovelace.

If India does not put centralized effort into the field of AI, it will result in a handicap which will be impossible to overcome. All of the major data collecting companies like Google, Facebook are not India based, hence crippling the nation with respect to data collection. One might even argue that this has already happened.

The lack of government interest in research as shown by their archaic recruitment procedures for research scholars will only harm this nation.

All of this will happen not because of someone's action, rather because of inaction. Technically ignorant people have been making decisions for technology based on advisers. We require people who understand the technology.

After all is done and dusted, I expect nothing to happen. I expect that India will take pride in it's inertia as it always has and at some point in the future people like us who understand what has happened will be forced to leave this nation we love so much.

All because of the government's ignorance towards AI.

Why the Spirit Rarely Survives

The spirit of the law, of an institution, a country, a song or a movement, are the most important things to them. They serve as symbols for people to rally around. In a deceptively light talk at TED, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells us of the dangers of the single story.

I think that the spirit is a single story. A single vision of how things should be, whether in law, colleges or countries for that matter. This single story however rarely survives the test of time, and I say that it is a virtue that such a thing happens, however in a lot of cases this original story becomes a background noise.

The original purpose is usually lost in the multitude of stories which become part of that one story. What usually ends up happening is that a group of such other stories merge into one and overshadow the original. Like marketing managers dictating film scripts. The original purpose of the film is lost in trying to propagate that original purpose itself.

In order for the spirit to be propagated, it must be made digestible for a lot of different kinds of people. It is usually this process of transformation which completely destroys the spirit.

If however, the spirit survives this brutal assault, it ends up even stronger, like  Nietzsche said. IITs, MIT, Harvard and St. Stephen's, all have had their spirit tested and have survived this. What has brought them fame and excellence is that they have managed to make the original purpose continue to live on as a powerful current in the ocean despite of all the other stories surrounding them.

Other institutes drown in the multitude of stories. We must not let the means become the end.

Defying Destiny And Why It's So Lucrative

Destiny is a veiled trickster, raising some to the pedestals of glory while playing cruel tricks on others. Destiny has always held human fascination. It might be because destiny itself is conceived as an immortal thing. It implies that we are instruments of something else. Something greater. It beguiles us into thinking that we matter.

Yet when it comes to defying it, we do so with great passion. Defying one's destiny is the strongest way in which we can express our free will. We can say to the maker, "I shall not accept what you have given me."

A man who works from a disadvantaged position and still wins. Such a man is indisputably the champion. Such a man is defying his destiny that wants to crush him. This is seen across all walks of life. The student who is not a genius, the sumo who is small, the underdog. That is what attracts us to those feats of
will.

We admire people who do this and yet shun them when we are in groups. We do that because we are afraid. This man has shown that nothing can keep a man who has made his mind. Then who was it who kept us from doing what we want?

I have been reading up on sumo for a while now. A distinction between sumo and other similar contact sports is that in professional sumo, there are no weight categories. There are no costumes.

A man competes with spirit, body and technique, completely discarding all other things which do not matter. It is an art of balance where if any other body part touches the ground other than the feet, you lose. If you exit the ring you lose.

One can see why Japan has the national sport of Sumo. The national sport of a nation declares the type of competition people there like. Sumo is a very simple sport and yet introduces complexities of immense magnitude in the higher levels. It is only because it is so simple to lose in sumo that it is so difficult.

I highly recommend Sumo to anyone looking to find inspiration in their lives.

Infinity Stone

Imagine the existence of a person on a sphere. The person can never find the end of the sphere and will yet run out of new places to see.

It is easy to reverse the question and look for things which have boundaries but an infinite number of states.

It might be interesting to see such a path of thinking explored. Does this model fit an infinite automaton?

What Educators Need to Learn From Machine Learning.

Machine learning. For someone who dreams of being an educator, this was one field which I did not expect to teach me anything with respect to Education. Never have I been so wrong. The very name should have told me something.

Machine Learning is centered around the idea that you can teach machines how to learn from the data it receives. The difference between teaching humans and machines is that for the machine you have to spell it out to completely. A human child already knows how to learn. A teacher's goal is to enhance that ability. What I present here are some things I learnt from studying Machine Learning.

There are two types of training in Machine Learning(ML). The first is supervised and the second is unsupervised. During supervised training, the computer is given input and shown expected output. Essentially what we are saying is "When you see this do this." The computer then learns on it's own to relate the input to the output. This method is fast, efficient and generally the road people take.

The other type of training is unsupervised. You give the computer some data and ask it "What do you see in this data?" generally speaking. This technique might not teach the AI what you intended but it allows it to find patterns that you yourself might have missed.

What educators must take away from this field is the fact that there are a lot of errors when teaching an AI anything. There is the problem of over training, causing the AI to perfectly know the training data but perform badly on new data which is previously unknown. This is akin to the habit of rote learning among students. While it allows you to perform incredibly well on the data you have been trained on, the performance drops drastically once new data is introduced.

Another facet is that AI are generally geared to do different tasks. If a Feed Forward Neural Network is asked to model a  time series it will fail. Not every student is the same. That does not mean that the current education methods count for nothing. What it means is that the educator needs to be especially perceptive of what the student is best suited for. Especially developing that need and letting the student develop that very skill is what an educator must do.

Coming back to rot learning, let me tell you about neural networks. Neural networks were inspired by the nervous system of humans. The brain is essentially a mass of neural networks. This lets us come to a conclusion that can help us teach better. The only way neural networks can learn anything new is by recalling that information again and again. However they are also incredibly good at building shortcuts. Recalling something the same way again and again slowly loses it's effect.

The challenge for the educator is to allow the student to recall the same information in different ways. One might take the example of the number PI. PI is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter. It is approximated as 22/7. A better approximation of PI is 355/113. Since PI is irrational it contains every possible number within it's never ending and never repeating fractional part.

With that we have created four different ways for the student to access the number PI. This increases the student's actual recall of the number PI itself. The human memory is unique in the fact that the more things you remember the more you can further remember. Let me illustrate. Your task is to remember this next drawing.

With the following bits of information you will know more about this character, thus giving you more ways to recollect it. Ultimately your memory of this character will be impeccable.

• It is a mandarin character
• It signifies the sun
• Originally it did look like a sun.
• It also signifies a single day 

Now that we know these bits of information we will remember this character better. Another bit of information is the evolution of this character as shown below.

Thus we can see that the more a student learns about a subject, the more they will be able to learn in the future.

With that I conclude this half-rant, half-wish of mine in the hope that I can one day be a good educator.