{"id":7,"date":"2022-04-15T04:21:25","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T04:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/?p=7"},"modified":"2022-04-15T04:21:25","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T04:21:25","slug":"first-inventing-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/2022\/04\/15\/first-inventing-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"First Inventing the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe<\/strong><\/p>– Carl sagan<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Whenever I begin learning a new concept in technology, I think about this Carl Sagan quote. While doing research about machine learning\/reinforcement learning, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole. What is DQN? CNN? a gym wrapper? Eventually I ended up on a video on linear algebra — after which I had the thought that maybe I’ve gone a little too deep. While in this headspace I began thinking about my deep seated fear of math. I also remembered how I wrote about having two eyes, and this helped me think about math in a new light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A medium for thoughts<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In the past few months I have realized how integral math is in life. It truly is a language on it’s own, a medium for which we can share certain types of thoughts and ideas. Recently I learned that long ago the idea of 0 was hotly debated in the world of math. People argued, “How can the absence of a number, be considered a number?”. Strange questions have been floating around my head as of late. If we didn’t have math, would we still be able to think about scenarios in a mathematical way? Is it the language (math) that fertilizes more mathematical thoughts? Or were these mathematical questions inevitable whether or not we had math to express them? Maybe I should have been a philosophy major.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of us, One of us<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly, my post has deviated from where it began, something that I am wont to do. For my capstone, my team and I are researching and developing our own self driving car. To do this we are painstakingly scouring the internet for resources for information on how to accomplish this feat. Subsequently I have been reading a lot about things like neural networks. Essentially we have found a way to roughly emulate human structure by making neural nodes and connections with computers. For a long time humanity has made efforts to make computers more human, more anthropomorphic. I think this is because making a human is the pinnacle of what we can do. We have been the progenitors of nearly everything that we interact with today. The desk I type upon may be made out of wood, but the hands a person shaped it for my convenience. If an argument is made that things like desks are now mass produced, a counter-argument could be made that humans made and maintain those machines. Some fear that computers may become too human and take over the world. I think that it is a possibility, but more likely people will always be behind the wheel in some capacity. Much like how a plane nearly flies itself but has to have a human pilot to oversee it, computers are a tool. I don’t know if we will ever reach a point where computers can match our discernment, and levels of cogent creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s been nice to air out my thoughts, but there is a universe to be made and I’ve only scratched the surface of how to make it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe – Carl sagan Whenever I begin learning a new concept in technology, I think about this Carl Sagan quote. While doing research about machine learning\/reinforcement learning, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole. What is DQN? CNN? a gym […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12450,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12450"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/plmblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}