Turtles at the Bottom 🐢

Andrew August's Notebook

Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
— Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Figuring out the best way to explain something is almost always the best way to understand it yourself.
— Leonard Susskind, The Theoretical Minimum

Thermal Physics Part I: Statistical Mechanics

12/2024

The physics of many-particle systems, modeled from the bottom up.

Quantum Mechanics Part III: Joint Systems & Entanglement

11/2023

Notes on interacting quantum systems, based on Leonard Susskind’s book The Theoretical Minimum.

Quantum Mechanics Part II: Dynamics & Continuous States

07/2023

Notes on quantum dynamics and continuous states, based on Leonard Susskind’s book The Theoretical Minimum.

Quantum Mechanics Part I: States & Principles

06/2023

Notes on the foundations of quantum mechanics, based on Leonard Susskind’s book The Theoretical Minimum.

Classical Mechanics

05/2022

Notes on classical mechanics from Leonard Susskind’s book The Theoretical Minimum.

TLDR: CNN Texture Bias

01/2021

A summary of the paper ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased toward texture; increasing shape bias increases accuracy and robustness by Geirhos et al, 2019.

PlatformIO Notes

02/2020

PlatformIO is an IDE for Arduino that supports environments and command-line uploads, but more importantly it has code completion and inspections, which the default Arduino IDE doesn’t have.

The Hiring Problem

09/2019

A toy problem about optimizing the trade-off between information collection and lost opportunity, in the context of hiring job applicants.

Neural Style Transfer

02/2019

What defines the style of an image? Can it be captured computationally? If so, is it possible to transfer styles from one image another, like making a selfie appear to be painted by Van Gogh?

Kaggle Ship Detection Challenge

11/2018

Detecting ships in sattelite images, from a Kaggle challenge.

04/2018

The first link on most Wikipedia pages goes to the next most general thing. “Poker” goes to “card game”, “card game” goes to “game”, etc. Where do all these first links finally lead? Does Wikipedia’s have something like a first-link taxonomy?

Satellite Image Classification on the FMoW Dataset

12/2017

Classifying objects in satellite images, from the Functional Map of the World dataset.

Discovering Class-Hierarchies by Clustering Confusion Matrices

10/2017

An example of finding class hierarchies by applying spectral clustering to confusion matrices.

Solving Threes

03/2016

A derivation of the optimal policy for the dice game Threes.

Artificial Life, Neural Nets, and Genetic Algorithms

11/2015

Can neural nets control Artificial Life agents? Can genetic algorithms optimize these nets? In this post I implement a genetic algorithm called Enforced Subpopulations to show that yes, yes they can.

Learning to Crawl: A Physical Implementation of Reinforcement Learning

12/2014

An Arduino robot learning to crawl using reinforcement learning, with a video about RL and how it’s implemented in the robot.

Songbook

ongoing

When guitar chord websites are all covered in ads and pop-ups, what do you do? Host your own chords, ad free!