8 ms·
Bayes' Theorem with Lego
- johnloeber 12y agoThat's quite nice; well done. The Lego definitely helps communicate intuition. I also like how you're very thorough in the computations -- it makes a good introduction.
- noelwelsh 12y agoGreat article, but really it's the pun in the name that made it for me. Good job, Count.
- CountBayesie 12y agoI'm a lover of awful puns, and was actually surprised how few people I knew got it! I'm very glad you appreciate it, thanks!
- octatoan 12y agoJazz and math. Ah. What more could one ask for?
- gadders 12y agoAgreed. I just came here to complement the URL.
- jessaustin 12y agoI think this: Great, we have arrived at the conditional probability of red given yellow! ...should have "red" and "yellow" switched. It's kind of confusing otherwise.
- CountBayesie 12y agoThanks for the catch! It should be corrected now
- ibebrett 12y agoI think it should be pointed out that bayesian's believe bayes theorem as a statement about plausibility of statements, so intuitions about an event space (which are obvious statements about sets) don't carry over to the general case.
- rndn 12y agoDo you (or someone else) happen to know of a good introduction into Bayesian's intuition about the plausibility of statements?
- pdkl95 12y agohttp://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/03/11/frequentism-and-bayesianism-a-practical-intro/ http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/03/11/frequentism-and-bay... This a very good 4 part series on the subject, with a focus (esp. in part 3) on how this affects scientific statements.
- tmoertel 12y agoThe best reference is Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. The first three chapters are online for free and explain the development of probability theory as a logic for plausible reasoning [1]. If you want to get a quick taste, I wrote a short blog post that introduces the theory while working through an interesting coin-toss problem [2]. [1] http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf [2] http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2010-12-20-more-on-the-evidence-of-a-single-coin-toss.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2010-12-20-more-on-the-evidenc...
- ibebrett 12y agoIf you hadn't beat me to it, this is exactly what I would have suggested
- beloch 12y agoReading this makes me wish my math profs had played with lego during class.
- balazsdavid987 12y agoGreat work! Recently I've been contemplating the idea of starting a blog that explains math concepts using LEGO bricks, this post gave me faith that there will be some interest in such a thing!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ygra 12y agoDear people who write math: Don't write text as-is in math mode. Either use \mathrm/\mathit (for LaTeX) or "" (for Word) to prevent random text being interpreted (and typeset as) variables adjacent to each other. The spacing for $numberOfYellowPegs$ is particularly horrifying.
- JadeNB 12y ago> use \mathrm/\mathit (for LaTeX) Even better, use `\text`, which re-sizes properly.
- tragomaskhalos 12y agoI often break out the lego when helping the kids with their maths homework - it really helps with visualisations and spatial reasoning.