the_scign

the_scign t1_j6d2no9 wrote

Reply to comment by Arquen_Marille in Transition probabilities (shown as percentages) between successive letters in the names of girls born in 2021 in the USA [OC] by kilopeter

Number is the percentage chance of the next letter being the column letter, assuming you're already at the row letter. I.e. if you are at a "Q", there's a 95% chance the next letter will be a "U". This says nothing about the "popularity" of the letter combination by itself.

"A" as a next letter follows most consonants. Not necessarily the second letter in the name.

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the_scign t1_j43jx5z wrote

Reply to [D] Would you consider the computer program Theo Jansen used to design the Strandbeest (beach walking mechanisms) to be Machine Learning? by lavaboosted

I tend to think of "machine learning" as the use of some automated algorithm to learn a ruleset as opposed to manually programming that ruleset. More often than not this algorithm requires some external dataset from which to learn the rules but in this case the algorithm is using another ruleset configured by Jansen to learn the rules. In that sense, since there was an automated algorithm that generated a "model" that abided by a set of externally provided rules, I would class this as machine learning.

That said, some people consider only scenarios where external data points were provided, rather than a set of rules, as machine learning. They may be right and I may be wrong - I'm open to debate on that.

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