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Comment by Kerb_ | Hacker News Reader

You can think chemotherapy is a local maxima for cancer treatment and hope medical research seeks out other options without having the resources to do it yourself. Not all of us have access to the tools and resources to start experimenting as casually as we wish we could.

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Not a single one of you bigbrains used the word "maxima" correctly and it's driving me crazy.

As I understand it a local maxima means you’re at a local peak but there may be higher maximums elsewhere. As I read it, transformers are a local maximum in the sense of outperforming all other ML techniques as the AI technique that gets the closest to human intelligence.

Can you help my little brain understand the problem by elaborating?

Also you may want to chill with the personal attacks.

Not a personal attack. These posters are smarter than I am, just ribbing them about misusing the terminology.

"Maxima" is plural, "maximum" is singular. So you would say "a local maximum," or "several local maxima." Not "a local maxima" or, the one that really got me, "getting trapped in local maxima's."

As for the rest of it, carry on. Good discussion.

A local maxima, that is, /usr/bin/wxmaxima...

Touché...

While "local maximas" is wrong, I think "a local maxima" is a valid way to say "a member of the set of local maxima" regardless of the number of elements in the set. It could even be a singleton.

You can't have one maxima in the same way you can't have one pencils. That's just how English works.

You can't have one local maxima, it would be the global maxima. So by saying local maxima you're assuming the local is just a piece of a larger whole, even if that global state is otherwise undefined.

No, you can’t have one local maxima, or one global maxima, because it’s plural. You can have one local or global maximum, or two (or more) local or global maxima.

"You can't have one local pencils, it would be the global pencils"

No, a member of the set of local maxima is a a local maximum, just like a member of the set of people is a person, because it is a definite singular.

The plural is also used for indefinite number, so “the set of local maxima” remains correct even if the set has cardinality 1, but a member of the set has definite singular number irrespective of the cardinality of the set.

I've been convinced, thanks!

yeah, not a Nissan in sight

“Maxima” sounds fancy, making it catnip for people trying to sound smart.

MNIST and other small and easy to train against datasets are widely available. You can try out anything you like even with a cheap laptop these days thanks to a few decades of Moore's law.

It is definitely NOT out of your reach to try any ideas you have. Kaggle and other sites exist to make it easy.

Good luck! 8)

My pet project has been trying to use elixir with NEAT or HyperNEAT to try and make a spiking network, then when thats working decently drop some glial interactions I saw in a paper. It would be kinda bad at purely functional stuff, but idk seems fun. The biggest problems are time and having to do a lot of both the evolutionary stuff and the network stuff. But yeah the ubiquity of free datasets does make it easy to train.

Not to mention not everyone can be devoted to doing cancer research. Some Drs. and Nurses are necessary to you know actually treat the people who have cancer.

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