Dear friends,
Welcome to this special Halloween issue of The Batch!
In AI, we use many challenging technical terms. To help you keep things straight, I would like to offer some definitions that I definitely would not use. I hope you’ll find this alternative AI glossary a breath of fresh scare:
- Activation function: An incantation used to raise the dead
- Dropout: A portal to another dimension that suddenly appears underfoot
- Early stopping: When you’re tired of collecting candy and you go home to bed
- Feature extraction: Getting a vampire’s fangs out of your neck
- Greedy policy: Self-explanatory when trick-or-treating
- Hinge loss: When the squeaky door falls off of a haunted house
- Learning rate: How quickly werewolves realize they can’t break down your door but can climb through your window
- Mini-batch: The amount of candy you have after early stopping
- Overfit: When you’ve eaten so much Halloween candy you can’t button your clothes
- Random forest: Where random witches live
Happy Halloween to all who celebrate it. Now let’s get this party started!
Keep learning,
Andrew