Theory

Preamble Recently (false) I became nostalgic and fascinated with stuff from the past, but someone told me many times I’m a future-man cause I tend to project everything in my life. So let’s play with the future - TA-DA! Sanremo Festival, precisely the 2023 Edition1 is coming to town (not mine) so I decided to play for real to FantaSanremo. What is this? Formally, FantaSanremo was born in 2020 from the idea of a group of friends working in the entertainment industry (musicians, music teachers, sound technicians) who are fans of the Sanremo Festival and were inspired by the Fanta-Game of Thrones, a fantasy game based on the TV series of the same name. The FIF (Federazione Italiana FantaSanremo) is created, which consists of 8 people and has the task of drafting the first regulations. The virtual currency with which to buy the artists of one’s team is named Baudo in honor of the famous Pippo, an icon of the Festival with the greatest number of conductions to his credit. ...

Much more than a post (again) What is the quantum theory? As said by quantumexperience official site by IBM, it’s an elegant mathematical theory able to explain the counterintuitive behavior of subatomic particles, most notably the phenomenon of entanglement. In the late twentieth century it was discovered that quantum theory applies not only to atoms and molecules, but to bits and logic operations in a computer. This realization has been bringing about a revolution in the science and technology of information processing: I decided to write some notes to better explain, from a physics-agnostic computer scientist’s point of view XD, what I understood - and it is certainly wrong - about Q until now and why I think it’s an amazing field for computer science. More on this story in my previous post. ...

Preamble This is a repost of an old article :) In 1962, Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó introduced the Busy Beaver competition for Turing machines: in a class of machines, find one which halts after the greatest number of steps when started on the empty input. Even if it could seem trivial, the Busy Beaver competition has implications in computability theory, the halting problem, and complexity theory. I decided to use GoLang to implement a Turing machine library and accomplish three goals: first, having a Turing Machine model to play with for learning purpose; second, learning how to use interfaces and the factory pattern, other then testing package to test my code and let it be more flexible for future enhancement (at least I hope!); third, implement some Busy Beaver setup and verify that the model works with well known executions. If you want to discover more about Golang, 60’s math games and beavers, go ahead with reading :D! ...

Preamble Recently I became nostalgic and fascinated with stuff from the past, so I decided to create a Vagrantfile to work with FreeBSD1. Why FreeBSD? Because as a developer, I really like Docker and I started looking in the past to find its historical birth: in fact, as a concept, Docker is no so recent as you think, and I think it exists also because of the works of some other bigs from 80’, such as Poul-Henning Kamp2. Starting from its work and using a FreeBSD installation I did some experiments with jails, to understand better what they really are, how they works - how can you create what it will look like a vintage container - and why you should use them in a FreeBSD environment - at least, to learn something new. ...

Intro Mute post Bye

Prelude A long long time ago (I can still remember as Madonna sang) I started to wrote some posts about the network. For those who missed the previous posts, you can read the introduction, the physycal layer and the datalink layer respectively. As a main source I use Computer Networks and TCP/IP Illustrated. In the previous posts I had to go into details about how some parts of the physical layer works but - by going forward through the layers - concepts belonging to separate historical standards - OSI and IP - will intertwine and this entails some troubles from a logical point of view. In this article, I will continue from there by going more practical with some hands-on to better understand this topics. ...

Much more than a post (again) What is the quantum theory? As said by quantumexperience official site by IBM, it’s an elegant mathematical theory able to explain the counterintuitive behavior of subatomic particles, most notably the phenomenon of entanglement. In the late twentieth century it was discovered that quantum theory applies not only to atoms and molecules, but to bits and logic operations in a computer. This realization has been bringing about a revolution in the science and technology of information processing: I decided to write some notes to better explain, from a physics-agnostic computer scientist’s point of view XD, what I understood - and it is certainly wrong - about Q until now and why I think it’s an amazing field for computer science. More on this story in my previous post. ...

Preamble In 1962, Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó introduced the Busy Beaver competition for Turing machines: in a class of machines, find one which halts after the greatest number of steps when started on the empty input. Even if it could seem trivial, the Busy Beaver competition has implications in computability theory, the halting problem, and complexity theory. I decided to use GoLang to implement a Turing machine library and accomplish three goals: first, having a Turing Machine model to play with for learning purpose; second, learning how to use interfaces and the factory pattern, other then testing package to test my code and let it be more flexible for future enhancement (at least I hope!); third, implement some Busy Beaver setup and verify that the model works with well known executions. If you want to discover more about Golang, 60’s math games and beavers, go ahead with reading :D! ...

Preamble I would like to say “recently”, but actually is almost a few years I heard - and I’m still hearing a lot about Machine Learning and I didn’t want to believe it until now - believe me, I truly didn’t want to believe it - but yes here we are Machine Learning ufficially replace Big Data as buzzy word of the this past years, most problably will be still the word of the next year and I could not be more sad, frustrated, and worried about. Please haters don’t hate me, Internet don’t misunderstand me, companies don’t hire me, but first of all - please - don’t teach anything to your machines before finishing this post (!) 🤓 because they never learnt anything until now and they always felt good about so please - keep them simple operating system as they are, or at least talk with them before enrolled them in any advanced analytics course. ...

Introduction In my previous post I wrote about the cognitive architecture ACT-R, mainly putting together what I learnt by research over the topic. In this post, I would like to go more in depth about how ACT-R works, the concepts behind and try to provide my interpretation of some technical examples, regarding coding of the modeling and everything related. What really is ACT-R ACT-R is a production system theory that tries to explain human cognition by developing a model of the knowledge structures that underlie cognition. There are two types of knowledge representation in ACT-R: ...