[ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a problem in itself: knowing what tools are out there, that you've never
> heard of, that can adequately complete entire sections of your new project -
> even professionally, as in "handle details you haven't thought of yet because
> you just now discovered the need for this, but you'll have to take care of to do
> the project".

I have a friend who spends a couple of hours a day just browsing for
solutions to myriad problems... he manages to remember them and the
names and how to find them again. It is a fantastic skill. In the few
years I worked with him, we did almost nothing completely from
scratch. It was hard to keep up though.

> Or, take an example from just last night.  A friend of mine was converting
> logs from a chat tool for posting on the Web.  A long, tedious task of
> cleanup...until I told her that I'd made a tool to do exactly that, and would
> she like to borrow it?  What once took an hour now took a few minutes,
> and all that changed was being informed of the relevant tool.
>
> And in most Web programming jobs, when running into any novel task,
> the first thing to do is to search the Web for anyone else who's solved
> that task and posted public domain source code you're free to copy and
> use.  For example, I would venture that most people on this list do not
> know by heart the Luhn algorithm, which is used to determine whether a
> credit card number could be valid or is just a typo.  (This algorithm is
> 100% protection against mistyping a single CC digit with another digit,
> and good protection against other CC number mistyping errors.)  But
> yet, just knowing that it exists and what the name of it is, any of you
> can easily google for "luhn algorithm [LANGUAGE]" for any modern
> programming language and find examples of it.

See, this is where it would come in handy to rent your brain (or a
reasonable facsimile thereof) for an hour or two a day. I'd pay for
that. :-)

> This requires a bit of a change in thinking, from "how do I solve this
> problem" to "how do I find a solution to this problem".  Of course, not
> all such challenges have solutions out there to find, so you have to
> figure out when to stop looking and start solving it yourself.

I never do anything without searching for another solution first. In
my experience, if you don't find it in the first 5 minutes, it doesn't
exist over half the time. I'm sure this follows some kind of
statistical distribution, but whether it is a normal or poissan
distribution or something else, I could not begin to guess... perhaps
I should look it up... LOL

-Kelly