Publications by Learning Machines

Understanding the maths of Computed Tomography (CT) scans

09.01.2019

Noseman is having a headache and as an old-school hypochondriac he goes to see his doctor. His doctor is quite worried and makes an appointment with a radiologist for Noseman to get a CT scan. Modern CT scanner from Siemens Because Noseman always wants to know how things work he asks the radiologist about the inner workings of a CT scanner. The b...

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Understanding the Magic of Neural Networks

15.01.2019

Everything “neural” is (again) the latest craze in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Now what is the magic here? Let us dive directly into a (supposedly little silly) example: we have three protagonists in the fairy tail little red riding hood, the wolf, the grandmother and the woodcutter. They all have certain qualities and littl...

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If wealth had anything to do with intelligence…

23.01.2019

…the richest man on earth would have a fortune of no more than $43,000! If you don’t believe me read this post! Have you ever thought about the distribution of wealth as a function of some quality? Especially rich people pride themselves on extraordinary abilities, so that they somehow “deserve” their wealth. Now “abilities” is somewh...

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Hash Me If You Can

29.01.2019

We are living in the era of Big Data but the problem of course is that the bigger our data sets become the slower even simple search operations get. I will now show you a trick that is the next best thing to magic: building a search function that practically doesn’t slow down even for large data sets… in base R! On first thought this is total...

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Learning Data Science: Modelling Basics

05.02.2019

Data Science is all about building good models, so let us start by building a very simple model: we want to predict monthly income from age (in a later post we will see that age is indeed a good predictor for income). For illustrative purposes we just make up some numbers for age and income, load both into a data frame, plot it and calculate its ...

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So, what is AI really?

12.02.2019

One of the topics that is totally hyped at the moment is obviously Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. There are many self-proclaimed experts running around trying to sell you the stuff they have been doing all along under this new label. When you ask them what AI means you will normally get some convoluted explanations (which is a good sign...

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To understand recursion you have to understand recursion…

19.02.2019

Sorting values is one of the bread and butter tasks in computer science: this post uses it as a use case to learn what recursion is all about. It starts with some nerd humour… and ends with some more, so read on! Have a look at the following code and try to understand it: bogosort <- function(x) { while(is.unsorted(x)) x <- sample(x) x }...

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Customers who bought…

26.02.2019

One of the classic examples in data science (called data mining at the time) is the beer and diapers example: when a big supermarket chain started analyzing their sales data they encountered not only trivial patterns, like toothbrushes and toothpaste being bought together, but also quite strange combinations like beer and diapers. Now, the trivia...

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Evolution works!

05.03.2019

Source: Wikimedia Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. from Hamlet by William Shakespeare The best way to see how evolution works, is to watch it in action! You can watch the evolution of cars live in this application (but...

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Learning R: The Collatz Conjecture

12.03.2019

In this post we will see that a little bit of simple R code can go a very long way! So let’s get started! One of the fascinating features of number theory (unlike many other branches of mathematics) is that many statements are easy to make but the brightest minds are not able to prove them, the so called Collatz conjecture (named after the Germ...

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