Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There are so many who rave about AI, and its many forms like ChatGPT. Yes, the output of many of these AI’s is very impressive. And yes, they hallucinate too (cook up facts). All that’s well known.   What’s less well known is that many AI’s make mistakes with these two simple questions. The first one: Which is bigger? 9.2 or 9.11? The other one is just as simple: How many r’s does the word “strawberry” have?   Believe it or not, a lot of AI’s get those two questions wrong! What is going on? As you know, the AI’s can (on many topics) explain their reasoning. So they were asked to explain how they come to the wrong answers.   On the 9.2 v/s 9.11 question, the AI’s say there are multiple interpretational patterns to evaluate the question. The maths way is just one of them . The maths way leads to the obvious answer (9.2 is the same as 9.20; and so 9.20 or 9.2 is bigger). But there are other ways to look at the question. One such way is to read them as “2” and “...

I was thinking of the entire sequence of events that was set off when Hamas invaded and kidnapped those 100+ Israelis in October, ’23. Since then, in response, Israel has practically wiped out Hamas, bombed Gaza to the ground, attacked Lebanon, weakened Hezbollah enormously, and most recently, attacked Iran’s military leaders and its nuclear sites. A righteous war taken too far? ~~   All this reminded me of a point the standup comedian, Trevor Noah, makes in  his autobiography, Born a Crime . The Holocaust was a terrible and evil act, no doubt. But there have been plenty of other terrible and evil acts through history, many of which are not even disputed. Why is it that the Holocaust gets so much disproportional attention?   A key point, he says, is that the Nazis maintained meticulous records of the numbers and methods they used to exterminate Jews. When the perpetrator maintains records, well, the data cannot be disputed. No such luck for the Africans of Congo...

Max Planck is known as the founder of quantum theory. He came up with the idea of the quantum as “an act of desperation”, to explain weird experimental observations that could not be explained by theory. He found he could explain the observations “only by butchering the mathematics of the underlying theory”, by assuming the existence of “quanta”. But to him, quanta were just mathematical constructs, not real-world constituents.   Albert Einstein , in trying to explain the photoelectric effect, concluded that the energy of light (and all electromagnetic waves) was quantized. Quantization was real, argued Einstein, not just a mathematical convenience.   Many had noted that Maxwell’s laws were “symmetrical” in certain mathematical ways. Einstein went further than others. Not just Maxwell’s laws, he said, (mathematical) symmetry applies to all universal laws of nature . Conversely, he said, if a universal law isn’t symmetrical, it’s wrong. So far, all experiments show th...

You can’t do physics without maths. It’s been that way since Newton. But has it gone too far, many have asked, to a point where physicists fall in love with “beautiful” mathematical theories and stop caring if it aligns with the real world? Phrases like “fairy tale physics”, “not even wrong”, and “lost in math” capture that sentiment.   Farmelo Graham’s book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers , traces the history of the relation between physics and maths. The story starts with Newton ’s theory of gravity – the equations matched observations, but, complained the critics (even back then), it didn’t describe the physical mechanism behind gravity. This was also a case of Continental envy – the British worshipped Newton, while the Continent felt he was a mathematician, not a physicist.   A generation later, the roles reversed. Frenchmen like Laplace advocated and advanced physics via maths, while the British dismissed such an approach as “flowery regions of algebra”. Not jus...

In his autobiography, Born a Crime , the comedian Trevor Noah talks about the names of black South Africans. Since the whites could not pronounce African names, the natives would have to (also) take on a name for whites to use, the so-called English name. This English name was chosen at random – “plucked from the Bible or taken from a Hollywood celebrity or a famous politician in the news”. Thus, names like Napoleon, Mussolini and even Hitler.   Such names offend whites, but Noah is unapologetic. The whites came, invaded, occupied, treated the natives like crap, did not educate them, and then act offended by the fact that the blacks don’t know history (of whites) and pick names like Mussolini and even Hitler. Whereas, as Noah says: “Many black people in South Africa don’t really know who Hitler was.” Noah’s own grandfather thought Hitler was a tank since all the news said it was crashing through Europe! Many South Africans considered Hitler good because he had white Europe...

Tim Harford wrote a thought-provoking article on the inflation numbers calculated by governments: “The consumer price index, or CPI, aims to measure the average price paid by UK consumers.”   The devil lies in the details. What basket of items you use for the calculation matters. Is it truly representative? But wait, here are further nuances: some items matter more to poor people than others (e.g. food prices).   And then there’s the problem that humans change their behavior. If the price of certain items goes up, they shift to cheaper alternatives. In which case, the increased price of the item doesn’t affect them anymore: “They might pick up some cheap carbohydrates. Rice one week, spaghetti the next — whatever was on special offer.” Even if you could magically factor in for such changing preferences, it’s not enough. After all: “It makes sense to calculate inflation by looking at the same goods, month after month.” But if you keep changing the list of ite...