I chose “Random Walk” as the name of my website, as both a representation of my work and personal interests.
Randomness is prominent in the fields of modern statistical theory, machine learning, and AI (Deep Learning). In recent years, the unpredictability of the Large Language Model(LLM) has presented a major challenge for companies and individuals looking to adopt the latest AI in their business and daily life. However, I think randomness brings a lot of opportunities and beauty to the world, too.
An example of this is my own process of debugging a technical issue: sometimes, I may think of a few potential solutions, but I don’t yet know which one is optimal. I might randomly proceed with one of the ideas if they all look viable to me. If it doesn’t work, I would roll back to the previous version and try another approach. Random seeds(np.random.seed(1234)😉) or random experiments can lead to solutions and innovations.
When I was a teenager, I was fascinated by Jorge Luis Borges’s short novel The Garden of Forking Paths. The novel is very mysterious, multidimensional, and intriguing. It visualizes our life (or world) as a giant labyrinth; whenever we make a decision, it leads to one of life’s paths. In a way, it’s similar to Github forking and branching. Do all paths converge to the same global optimal like random walk in Markov chain Monte Carlo method? Or is my existence and selfhood only one of many in an infinite number of universes?
A Gitflow visualization
I appreciate the ways in which theory, engineering, and art converge upon “Random Walk.” I hope you enjoy a short walk on my site.