- Opens PDF.
- Typeset in Computer Modern.
- Starts running, screaming in Comic Sans.
Jokes aside, CM is not the only game for math-heavy documents. Something like Libertinus [1] would probably be more screen-friendly.
Decades pass and you realize they either have little to no application or are incredibly niche :(
Too bad that "solution in a search of a problem" is generally bad approach to problem-solving. I wish our industry was more fun as a whole.
https://www.zabaware.com/ultrahal/
Ultra Hal was a best in class chat bot when fixed response systems like Alice/ AIML were the standard. Ultra Hal used Markov chains and some clever pruning, but it dealt with a few hundred tokens as words and sequences only 2 or 3 tokens out. It occasionally produced novel and relevant output, like a really shitty gpt-2.
I think we may see a resurgence of expert systems soon, as gpt-3 and transformers have proved capable of automating rule creation in systems like Cyc. They've already incorporated direct lookups into static databases gpt / RETRO type models. Incorporating predicate logic inference engines seems like the logical and potent next step. GPT could serve as a personality and process engine that eliminates the flaw (tedium) in massive, tedious, human level micro-tasking systems from GOFAI.
It's worth going through all the literature all the way back to the 1956 summer of code and hunt for ideas that just didn't work yet.
Markov chains form the basis of n-gram language models, which are still useful today.
Markov chains are also the basis of the Page-rank algorithm.
Hidden Markov Models (which are just an extension of Markov Chains to have unobserved states) are a powerful and commonly used time series model found all over the place in industry.
In the pre-deep learning model Markov chains (and HMMs) in particular had very wide spread usage in Speech processing.
They are probably one of the most practical statistical techniques out there (out side of obvious example like linear models).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_by_partial_matching
This is great fun. Once it has learned a little about you and your friends it sometimes spits out a lyrical home-run. It is of course you who provide the intelligence of interpretation, but it still feels mysterious when it 'talks' in a way relevant to the context.
