- Добавил: literator
- Дата: 16-03-2023, 18:03
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Автор: Oliver Johnson
Издательство: Heligo Books
Год: 2023
Страниц: 368
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB
Our everyday lives are increasingly ruled by data and by algorithms. We can make ourselves understood by talking to Siri, and instantaneously receive almost professional-quality translations of foreign language text using Google Translate. Netflix can match our previous viewing to profiles of similar users, to recommend the next box set that we are most likely to get hooked on. However, it may be less obvious that this kind of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘Machine Learning’ emerged from mathematics and from statistics. These ideas have had a rebrand for the 21st century and been supercharged by ever-increasing computing power, but it’s always mathematics under the bonnet. These Silicon Valley marvels rely on ideas like the geometry of clouds of points in a world of millions of dimensions, techniques for finding structure and form in randomness and mathematically rigorous ways of dealing with vast amounts of data. Most people don’t know what a professional mathematician does all day. Perhaps they imagine that we are memorising harder and harder times tables (‘one 19,573 is 19,573, two 19,573s are 39,146’) or competing to see who can remember the most digits of pi. Maybe they imagine a dusty old man writing incomprehensible chalk equations full of Greek letters on a blackboard (and to be fair, this isn’t always so far wrong). Some of this is the mathematicians’ fault. We haven’t exactly gone out of our way to explain why what we do matters. This book is an attempt to redress that balance.