brainwagon

This week began with a visit from Pat Hanrahan, currently a professor at Stanford and formerly at Princeton, where I was lucky enough to meet him. He came by to talk about probabilistic programming languages, which are an interesting topic that he and his students have made some interesting progress in solving difficult problems. I don’t have much to say about it, except that it seemed very cool in a way which I’ve come to expect from Pat: he has a tendency to find interesting cross disciplinary connections and exploit them in ways that seem remarkable. I haven’t had much time this week to think about his stuff more, but he did mention this website which gives examples of probabilistic computation and cognition, which seemed pretty cool. I’m mostly bookmarking it for later consumption.