Multiplicity

In 1906, a man by the name of Francis Galton goes to a livestock fair and there he saw an intriguing contest. In this contest, an ox was on display and the villagers were invited to guess what the animal’s weight was, after it has been slaughtered and dressed. At that point, about 800 people attempted to guess the weight but not one hit the exact one of 1,198 pounds. However, the average of those 800 people that guessed came very close to it. They guessed; 1,197 pounds. After this, Galton thus came up with the concept of Correlation.

Sampling, multiplicity, discrete, continuous

Sample rate is 44,100 per sec

· Pixels – dpi

· Audio samples – kHz

· Frame rate – fps

Bandwidth insufficient?

· Fewer samples

· Better/more compression

Computers can do more and more things per second. As the computers get faster, the bandwidth increases.

Scale

Online, things scale a lot and when offline, they do no scale as much. Comparing websites, the scale of some websites like Google is too big, in comparison to most of the websites.

Iteration

Computers are good at doing the same thing again and again. They tend to follow a sequence that leads to a sort of repetition of data that is being processed, ie; 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,etc, Fibonacci sequence of; F(n)=F(n-2)+F(n-1). The process of building something like this is called an algorithm. It is a logical way of getting from one point to another point.

Combinatorial explosion

It is where something is built and it turns out to be something considerably huge. It is common among video games, as the plot tends to build as the people keep playing it, ie; World of War Craft. If we are considering websites, Google is another good example for this, as it started out as online dictionary for university students, but it is presently the world’s best search website. It works in a way that one thing is typed in, and many links that link to even more information are provided. Hence page rank.

Collaborative filtering

This is where the information is filtered using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, view points, data sources, etc. eg.Amazon, Netflix, etc.

Crowd sourcing

A method used for getting something from multiple human beings, eg; 99 designs, mechanical turk-by Amazon, means artificial intelligence. A situation where there was a robot that used to be able to play chess back in the 1950’s, when technology was being exploited and being ventured into.

v The wisdom of crowds – this is a book by James Surowiecki. He was interested in how groups of people make great decisions. He points out that as individual humans, we are not good at making good decisions.

There are 4 things that he thinks are important;

v Diversity- of opinions that are drawn from a diverse range of things

v Independence – people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.

v Decentralization – people specialize in whatever information they want to.

v Aggregation – put together people’s opinions and deciding what is more suitable.

Wikipedia

· Open source software

Anyone can download software and upload whatever they like. It also allows different perspectives and opinions and upgrades to be exploited and ventured into.

· Decision markets

You can bet on how things are going to turn out, ie; works well with Oscar winners, presidential elections, etc.

Dutch tulipomania, US dot-com bubble, Sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The value of a tulip ball was equivalent to the value of 12 acres of land.

As the price goes up, people jeep buying something with an aim of selling it in the future basing on the assumption that the price shall go up and they shall gain from it in the future, ie; shares. This can be shown by an upward sloping curve.

The tools that you use not only affect the turn-out of things but the possibility of that vision. ie; development of algorithms leads to an extension in the buildings, suburbs, cities, etc, that is in architecture.

Look at-

The IK Project II; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5XJY18y-o

Ted_ Ideas worth Spreading; Photosynth http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html