Skip to main content

First Week, First Chapter

I just finished my first week and want to reflect a bit on why I started this. There are two main reasons: Deepen and broaden my knowledge of Information Theory; and motivate people who might hesitate on taking up the challenge or feel too old to start learning or revisiting a field.

The book is very exciting; Mackay's writing is clear and flows nicely, introducing a concept, diving into it, and then out to generalise. His approach is to make you feel as if you are constructing and checking the concepts alongside him. His magic is that the presentation feels both casual and principled, like if you were sitting together with a very smart friend who is explaining you things.

I ended this week at page 21, so my current rate is 3 pages per day since I will not be working the weekend. At the current rate I would finish the book in about 6 months. Mackay's prediction for the time required for each exercise worked quite well for me although it took me more time than expected in a few of them. My approach is to try to solve each exercise in time and if I can't, take a quick peek at the solution and then try until I fully grasp it. Mackay does not have time suggestion for exercises above level 2, so I am assuming [3] is 1 hour, [4] is one to a few days, and [5] is months.

As for coding, I am having some troubles with Octave's command window in Ubuntu so I coded everything in Matlab and put it on my GitHub (https://github.com/pauloabelha/).








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jester in the Dark: Encoding Knowledge into Inferences - Part I

You are dining at the castle hall and the king announces he is going to give the jester's his yearly payment. He points at a small adjacent room, where there are 3 small equal chests. The first with 2 gold coins; the second, 1 gold and 1 silver coin; the third, 2 silver coins. The king's serfs go inside, shuffle the chests, lock them, put out the candles, and summon the court jester to the hall. The buffoon is told to put his hand in a bag, grab 1 chest key, walk into the dark room and get 1 coin out of the matching chest. He brings the coin back and it is a gold one. The king takes the coin from his hand and says aloud: - If I send this idiot back there to get the other coin out of the same chest, how likely it is to be gold? The jester interrupts: - Please do send me, sire! I'd likely be a happy idiot, with one more gold coin. The king angrily points out to the jester's face : - Folly! I'll have you beheaded for stupidity. This gold coin could ha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slaying The Mythical p

Finally I have come out of the introductory chapters forest. In mission 3.15, MacKay summons us to slay the mythical p-value. The weapons we carry are simple, but sharp and the insights look very promising. This mission will lead us to confront the p-value and its meaning when we are comparing two different models. In this post we are going to carefully go through the exercise solution and insights. First we are going to recalculate the statistician conclusion and then move on to MacKay's approach of comparing two models by how likely is the data given each of them. In a way, this post is also intended as containing part of the essence of chapters 1 and 3. Before reading on I suggest you work on the exercise yourself (for 15 minutes, even if you can't solve it): ‘If the coin were unbiased the chance of getting a result as extreme as that would be less than 7%’ We interpret this sentence as meaning that 7% is the probability of a fair coin getting 140 or mo...
Post a Comment
Read more