Author: yanzhang
AlphaGo – 6/6/2016
Back from a Beijing wedding. Observations of Beijing could probably be another WYL. Beijing is like a polar bear that fell asleep on a raft and woke up on the coast of England. It is proud, feisty, obsessed over its skin color, but mostly confused and trying to understand its surroundings.
Continue reading “AlphaGo – 6/6/2016”Protected: WYL – Quick Updates – 5/20/2016
Shanghai, Daejeon, Go
Lots of traveling and intensity.
- Just finished a trip to Dartmouth where I gave a talk and did some collaborations. Dartmouth is, like Stanford, a fantasy land that one can live in, but seems utterly different from the surrounding community. Best phrase learned during the trip (from Sylvester Gates): “sports is men’s version of gossip.”
- Started shooting around / doing drills at the neighborhood basketball court in mornings when I miss sprints (due to class preparation/sprint-specific pain, etc.). Supplemented by stealing moves from basketball videos and challenging people to one-on-one. Mikan drills have been really good for getting the left-hand.
- just had another successful year of SPARC, with higher-profile guest speakers (Dustin Moskovitz and Scott Aaronson); 35 kids felt a lot more manageable than the 40 last year. I felt surprisingly less important this year, which is a good thing. I should hopefully be completely replaceable in the next 3 years. (my replaceability is a good trait for SPARC to have; this is orthogonal with my own wishes to stay with SPARC)
Protected: WYL, 3/14/2015
Protected: WYL, 10/5/2014
Emotions and Rationality as Computation, Elephant Questions, Taiwan
Well, W has been up is that Y has been L-ing a lot over the last few months, and every time I need to sit down and write another WYL, another “urgent” project/travel/thing flares up. Good for productivity but bad for consistency. For those of you who have bugged me in the meantime, thanks for your interest, and sorry if you dislike such sporadic writing!
Continue reading “Emotions and Rationality as Computation, Elephant Questions, Taiwan”Protected: WYL, 2/26/2014
Inner Demonologues 2-4, Fields and Flows 2
Happy new year! For those of you in NYC, it was lots of fun seeing you. =) Several people requested I follow through on fighting inner demonologues and other insecurities. Several other people requested that I “build” on earlier material in general, so I’ll start off by making a continuation to this topic that will basically dominate this WYL.
Continue reading “Inner Demonologues 2-4, Fields and Flows 2”Inner Demonologues, Ingroup Responsibility, Service, Fields and Flow
I hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving! Some people wondered about the headers – I was just having some fun thinking of ways of portraying the context:
- Idea/Phrase Painting: I’m trying to paint a new idea (at least to myself – no idea is totally new), either original or new packaging.
- Mentality Massaging: means I’m taking an idea coined by someone else already and then thinking / wrestling with it.
- Learning from Mistakes: self-explanatory
- Skill Harvest: this means I’m trying to grab multiple ideas from whatever skill I’m learning at the moment..
Blue Slate 