You've heard of Markov chains. But who was Markov? | Hacker News Reader

You've heard of Markov chains. But who was Markov?

news.harvard.edu

112 pointskrg20 comments

Markov was an atheist. In 1912 he protested Leo Tolstoy's excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church by requesting his own excommunication. The Church complied with his request. [Wikipedia.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Markov)

I always assumed a Markov chain was some kind of Siberian drinking game. Hence the interest in the running the chain to its stationary distribution.

Odd that this was down-voted. It's a (bad) joke. Allow me to explain:

Calculating the stationary distribution is one of the main things people do with Markov chains. That's all that PageRank is -- the stationary distribution of the Markov chain constructed from the network of links on the web.

{The odds are pretty high that this will get downvoted, on account of the lack of vodka.}

Markovs is a natural law, proven, is it not? Well then, it will be found in any system.

I get the Markov chain part, I don't get the Siberian drinking game part....

Being a true Markov, his history is irrelevant!

Easily the best joke in this discussion.

the reason why not many people know who Markov is is that sometimes he is hidden. And a hidden markov can be quite elusive.

I recommend first checking for him in Monaco. Monte Carlo, Monaco, to be precise...

Just be sure to always bet on black, 2 ..

Just ask Viterbi, Viterbi always knows where the hidden Markov is.

> A “Monopoly” board has 40 possible “states”

Ah, just like chess has 64 possible states. Except that chess has on the order 10^47 states.

They needed to use "Chutes and Ladders," which really does have a handful of states.

The [position of a player on a Monopoly board] has 40 possible states.

But the transition between states in Monopoly depends not only on dice, but also upon the configuration of Chance and Community Chest cards, which has a much larger state space. Besides this, if you roll doubles three times, you go to Jail, which increases the state space more. For more:

http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml

Good point, you're right.

Russia used Julian calendar up to 1918. If that was a date marked in the original calendar, it wasn't 100 years ago "this week".

This is also why the October Revolution happened in November, depending on what calendar you use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_revolution

Slightly off-topic, but Brian Hayes (mentioned several times in the article) has a very good blog here: http://bit-player.org/

Even today wikipedia mentions nothing of interdependence on probability...

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