Wednesday, May 30, 2012

17 Year Old Builds a Better Search Engine

Of note, he indicates he didn't gain the skills to create his invention from formal education, but rather from studying on his own---which is how most of us learn about Austrian economics.


15 comments:

  1. Eff school. We'd be in the dark if we waited for someone with more than a 3rd grade education to make a light bulb.

    You can't teach common sense or tenacity.

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  2. We need to make sure he doesn't get scooped up by the government spooks. They'd love to harness this search capability.

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    1. Fact is, the government already has such search capabilities. Have you heard of the Vertica database? It can do far more.

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  3. Are you suggesting that we non-scholars should try to write a better Human Action? ;)

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    1. we "non-scholars" that have the benefit of the entire collective knowledge and experience of the human race at the touch of a button online?

      Yes.

      The layman couch-lounger has more data available to him than every institution of academia had for all of recorded history in his smartphone.
      I say that's a good thing in every way.

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    2. Hey, did you steal my valedictorian speech? ;)

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  4. There are plenty of smart people with great ingenuity. They are capable of being independent, because they can develop things that people want to buy. Unfortunately, they lack the inquisitiveness to be as fully free as possible, which is the key of genuine education.

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  5. This is not very impressive, relatively. At least from the description in the video--there might be more he's leaving out. Markov-based techniques are a dime a dozen these days, you'll find them applied to various things in blog articles and youtube videos every day. Actually if he took the free ai-class.com he would have learned about them from Google's head of Search.

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    1. Indeed. What he's doing is not revolutionary. I've personally worked on a search engine that looked at the statistical co-occurrence of words to find documents relevant to a search query with no matching keywords. We didn't use Markov chains, but techniques closer to those used in image analysis, specifically determine signals from the text, and generating an n-dimensional partitioned space of the signals, then searching through that.

      Any reasonably intelligent person can build a search engine. The challenge is making it fast when searching through billions of documents.

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    2. So did he, but he beat all non-hybrid state of the art methods.

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  6. "when I was 6 and had just finished the Harry Potter books"

    Let that one roll around your head for a while...

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  7. Hope he has the patent on his algorithm otherwise he'll never be allowed to use his own creation...

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  8. Wait, he didn't learn about Markov techniques in a government school? He learned it by himself? How...but....???

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  9. We are please to announce the winner of the Bill Gates look-alike contest...

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  10. I was there! I have pics too :)

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