1) Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'm going to walk you through "The Kelly Criterion".

2) In 1956, John Kelly published a paper titled "A New Interpretation of Information Rate" in the Bell System Technical Journal.

3) In the paper, Kelly described a simple and elegant way for investors to strategically allocate capital in the face of uncertainty.

This is what is now known as the Kelly Criterion.

4) The approach is easiest to understand with an example.

I'll keep it as realistic as possible:

Imagine that you walk into an antique store one day. Due to the persistence of the salesman there, you buy an old lamp from him.

5) You take the lamp home. You rub it. Out comes a genie. Nothing unusual.

What happens when a neural net tries to write rhyming lyrics?

Apparently, an ode to defunct Swiss chemical company Alusuisse.

The fine rhyming work of @mark_riedl's Weird A.I. program
https://t.co/TAOIWBr7RI

Rhyming is super hard, especially in English where threw rhymes with through but not dough, and the emphasis patterns are all over the place.

There's lots of AI poetry but there's a reason it doesn't tend to rhyme

.@mark_riedl's algorithm has a part that chooses rhyming words, scoring them according to their similarity to the song's theme.

Here, "Uzbekistan" was the closest rhyme it could think of for "saucepan" given cakes as a topic.

Good job, AI

There's a subalgorithm that has to come up with lines of a given number of syllables.

Occasionally it gives up and returns a line that's way too short. Another subalgorithm chooses from several candidate lines & often prefers the short lines.

So you get

au-u-u-u-u-u-u-gust

The subalgorithm that has to generate the rhyming lines often gets desperate, especially when the subalgorithm that chose the rhyme handed it something like "welp" or "alusuisse".

It will sometimes resort to making up words entirely

1/ A different way to think about life.

Our lives are all too often governed by living up to other people's opinion of us. We have this fear of appearing foolish, fear of being seen as unsophisticated, fear of missing out on things, fear of losing face.

Prestige is a trap.

2/ Prestige is a trap we set for ourselves. Those are the worst kind of traps.

Liberation is getting out of those traps.

We get a sense of security from those traps. It is a false security.

After all, who amongst us is 100% certain of surviving the pandemic?

3/ In reality this very life itself is uncertain and could be snatched from us at any moment.

Deeply understanding that is liberation.

Once we achieve that liberation, we quit seeking that false security that mental traps provide.

Our actions are now untainted by fear or ego.

4/ That liberation is itself the biggest gift life can bestow us.

We don't seek the liberation to be able to achieve wealth or prestige or status. They may come to us and they may not. In a true sense, we are not slaves to those. We become masters of ourselves.

5/ we can make it easier on ourselves to achieve that liberation.

One time honored way, as religious saints have shown us, is to physically move ourselves out of the grasp of those traps.

Cities are full of prestige and ego traps. Moving ourselves *may* help with liberation.