~3.9 mi @ ~13.3 min/mi

"KeyMaster?" Roadkill suggests a trail name for the newest member of Dawn Patrol, who recently completed his Masters degree work and, this morning, locks himself out of his car — again. Oops! But all ends well; Roadkill drives him to the office to get a spare, prepositioned there after an earlier incident.

"Chengyu are four-word idioms in Chinese," explains KeyMaster. — "Like 'Suck it up, Cupcake' in English?" We discuss randomly initializing a neural-net machine-learning system versus using some real-world knowledge to start it. Roadkill quotes a parable [1] from the early days of the MIT AI Lab:

... Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, "Hey, what are you doing?" Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. ...

"My daughter crossed the stage with me at graduation!" K2 recalls finishing her PhD two decades ago, and how much hard work went into it. Flowers bloom at the downtown nursery. The dash to Starbucks for iced coffee slows to a leisurely ramble back. Category theory banter centers on the prefix "co-", which means "opposite". (Hmmmm, funny to a mathematician, perhaps?) God rays fan across the sky from a rising sun.

(trackfile) - ^z - 2019-06-29