Martin Roberts

Advanced Analytics, ML & AI Consultant.

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

With much excitement and after a 3 year hiatus, I share my latest blog post "A New algorithm on multi-armed bandits".
https://t.co/HmnCxo136B

This topic that falls under the broad umbrella of #ReinforcementLearning and played a key role in the AlphaGo algorithm.

[Ben Grimmer @prof_grimmer]

I've proven the strangest result of my career..
The classic idea that gradient descent's rate is best with constant stepsizes 1/L is wrong. The idea that we need stepsizes in (0,2/L) for convergence is wrong.
Periodic long steps are better, provably.
https://t.co/Yqe5PUKgxI

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@roydanroy @Atrix256 You might like to read about isolation forests. I wouldn’t say it had a profoundly deep theoretical basis, but it was the first time in many years that I saw an approach for outlier detection that had a basis akin to information theory.

[morgan @CasualEffects]

It wasn't until I'd *taught* algorithms a few times that I finally understood why sorting is in the CS curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula don't explain this!

It is NOT because sorting is an important algorithm to learn to implement...

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@EricLengyel That is cool.

[Owen Williams ⚡ @ow]

I love the Samsung Frame TV but got really tired of paying a subscription for the art—so I made a little script that lets you use a folder of your own images to rotate randomly on your TV. 👀https://t.co/O2HxRzUd4x

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@ow This is very cool. My Samsung Frame tv is one of my favourite things in my house and all my family, friends and visitors love it so much. But I had the same irk as you.
For the record, I would happily pay you to continue this, then to pay a faceless commercial company!
😎💥✨

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@jrdnfrd @Atrix256 Kinja Basu was one of the first to write about this problem in 2014. Then in 2019 I did a post on it, https://t.co/6Sg00RJCVc
Then in 2020, Alan's friend, Eric Heitz, published a method much better than either of these.... https://t.co/wHFPt6Wtkt

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

Yeah and I thought it was really pushy and self-centred when I first saw it. But then I realised that everyone’s feed is so full and stuff disappears down within hours, that reposting useful things across the weekend at different times can actually be very helpful to readers.

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@Atrix256 I think although Twitter has passed its zenith, it will still be around for a long long time.
Nobody doubts they IBM or Yahoo have passed their prime, and virtually no-one ever mentions their name but they are still in 2023 both absolutely massive.

[TWO-N @2nfo]

Our Global Gender Gap Report is up for a Webby Award! Still some hours left to vote. If you ❤️ it, plz vote for us! https://t.co/MpTFeyvMId

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

Beautiful animations of the Fibonacci lattice when mapped to a disk and sphere.

[Amit Sch @meetamit]

Made this @observablehq notebook exploring Fibonacci lattices — a simple and elegant technique for evenly distributing points on a plane, circle and sphere. https://t.co/3mVUoek9Sj

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@meetamit This is very cool! Are you happy for me to put a link in my post to your ObservableHQ notebook?

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

Here's a small (but long overdue!) blog update to a very popular post that I wrote 2 years ago.

"How to evenly distribute points on a sphere more evenly than the canonical Fibonacci Lattice (Golden Spiral). https://t.co/HbVg8rHJK5

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@AlexisPaques @Atrix256 Many thanks. :)

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@michael_nielsen The reason I learned at (Australian) primary school was that “every word has a vowel in it.”

Almost every word has at least one occurrence of aeiou in it, but to make this rule complete, you need to include “y”.

This covers words like: by, dry, fly, my, try,

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@pmddomingos This is the secret of the MacDonalds business model.

It’s not the Big Mac, the real estate or cheap junk food.
It’s their unrivalled ability to train teenagers and 20-somethings, to run a commercial fast-paced business at international standards.

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@Atrix256 And the absolutely classic article on how all these different special constants are the basis of specific infinite tilings…

https://t.co/jGxozg0fq1

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@Atrix256 The golden ratio and the supergolden ratio are both Pisot numbers, which have the cool property that their powers are extremely close to integers.

[Martin Roberts @TechSparx]

@Atrix256 And of course as you know, the plastic constant 1.3247…. (which is also a pisot nnnber) is the basis for my quasi random sequence R_2.