Introduction The term “Bitcoin” is becoming more and more widespread. However the core technical details of the cryptocurrency are often brushed aside, or lumped together. Bitcoin is in fact a decentralised payment system, characterised by multiple features. In this post, I hope to identify and briefly explain these key features. Once we’ve identified the overall architecture of …

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Introduction In my last post I spoke about the general context of neural networks, namely machine learning algorithms. The problem being solved is one of abstracting rule definitions in solving a problem away from the programmer. We also saw that neural networks might stand out in their ability to identify useful feature transformations automatically, which would serve this overarching purpose. …

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Introduction Writing explicit programs to accomplish sophisticated tasks can quickly become intractable. For example, it may be evident how to tell a computer to change screen color based on which user is logged in: this is definite. Writing a definite program to recognize pigeons in a photo is not obvious. The core issue is that it is difficult to determine what set of rules is optimal, and even …

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Introduction Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are a widely used tool in solving all sorts of problems from natural language processing to signal reconstruction. Here I give an overview of the fundamental concepts involved. Let’s go! Markov Processes HMMs make the assumption that whatever is going on is following a Markov process, so let’s start with that. This isn’t complicated at …

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