Crypto gets its value from magic

When I got into crypto and started buying some, I decided that I should think about where its value really comes from. I realized soon that much of what sets the value is really just speculation: people buying and selling because they think its value is something, and that’s what actually ends up deciding much …

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Training Neural Networks with Genetic Algorithms

In this blog post I present my findings of an independent analytical and computational study of using genetic algorithms to train neural networks. This was my final project for an Introduction to Cognitive Science course that I took at The University of Texas at Austin, under Dr. David Beaver. My motivation comes from the fact …

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Target Distribution in Gnuplot

R code for multivariate random-walk Metropolis sampling

I couldn't find a simple R code for random-walk Metropolis sampling (the symmetric proposal version of Metropolis Hastings sampling) from a multivariate target distribution in arbitrary dimensions, so I wrote one. This is also my first R code. It requires the package MASS to sample from the multivariate normal proposal distribution using the mvrnorm function. …

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Python Script to Generate Frequency Counts of Words in a Text

The following python script takes a text file as input and produces an unsorted list of frequency counts of words in the text as an output text file. It's pretty simple and short, and uses only the regular expressions module re of python, which is a standard library, so this script will run in any …

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A Statistical Problem on Laptop Uptimes

Suppose you are in a large university campus. Most students here use laptops, and if you look around, you’d see most of them either working, listening to music or doing something else on their laptops. Suppose now you think of a quick project, of listing the uptimes of the laptops (how long they’ve been running). …

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