Conditioning ‘fullness expectations’ in a novel dessert

Bayesian Optimization for a Better Dessert

We present a case study on applying Bayesian Optimization to a complex real-world system; our challenge was to optimize chocolate chip cookies. The process was a mixed-initiative system where both human chefs, human raters, and a machine optimizer participated in 144 experiments. This process resulted in highly rated cookies that deviated from expectations in some surprising ways – much less su...

Fullness of life

Indeed if there is a criticism of the new edition with its expanded information base, it is that it is becoming more readable and is in some danger of turning into a textbook. It is clearly acknowledged in the introduction that many of the protocols described should not be considered unique or exclusive. This point is reiterated on occasions in the text where specific therapies are noted to be ...

In the Fullness of Time

Lister had been interested in wound infection, or “hospital gangrene” as it was known then, for many years. When operating on tuberculous changes in the wrist, he noted good results when the wound did not become infected. On the other hand, when infection set in, he encountered a high incidence of gangrene and blood poisoning.1 In Lister’s time, wound infection was generally thought to arise fr...

Eat dessert first.

Conditioning using conditional expectations: the Borel-Kolmogorov Paradox

The Borel-Kolmogorov Paradox is typically taken to highlight a tension between our intuition that certain conditional probabilities with respect to probability zero conditioning events are well defined and the mathematical definition of conditional probability by Bayes’ formula, which looses its meaning when the conditioning event has probability zero. We argue in this paper that the theory of ...