“Can God make a rock so heavy He can’t lift it?” The question is supposed to be a trap. Answer yes: then there’s something He can’t lift. Answer...

A quintessence of intelligence is that winners are first. So we begin, firstly, with first. The equation for entropy is typically presented as:

At Mieza we compute equilibrium strategies for imperfect-information games. Abstraction – compressing a game’s state space without losing the strategic information needed to reason and learn – is...

Frontier Search for N-Pointer Problems

Game graphs branch with each action and then branch again with the next, growing combinatorially – a growth rate which outpaces even exponential growth. To make progress, we...

The problem of evil has a hidden assumption: that a limited observer and an omniscient evaluator must reach the same judgment about what constitutes good action. They can’t....

When you are trying to do something hard – become the best in the world at something, start a company, master an unfamiliar domain – your own current...

Good note-taking systems have the same architecture as good databases: a write-ahead log for fast capture, a processing step that builds a graph structure, and a query layer...

For some technical debt is just a list of shouldn’t and best practice a list of should. I find this to be a poor framing and one prone...

Two things separate programmers who plateau from those who don’t: they build an accurate mental model of execution through deliberate practice, and they prove their systems survive disaster...

It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages...

When your intuition disagrees with the math on a probability problem, simulate. A few lines of code settles arguments that have stumped PhDs, doctors, and sports fans alike....

An r-chart blog post analyzed the Google AI Competition rankings. Paul Graham’s strong advocacy for Lisp made the natural question obvious: did Lisp actually outperform other languages? The...