Frankly speaking ...

Over the weekend, I had the chance to explore a local forest with my partner. As we wandered along the track, we came upon a variety of mushrooms and fungi sprouting from the forest floor. It was a magical moment that sparked my curiosity about these fascinating organisms. When I think of the terrestrial world, I usually picture plants as the foundational pillars of life on land. However, long before the first leaves reached for the sun, a vast, hidden network was already laying the groundwork: fungi . What fascinates me about fungi is how they exist in a category entirely their own—neither plant nor animal, yet holding the world together. Molecular evidence suggests they diverged from a common eukaryotic ancestor roughly 1.5 billion years ago (much like the deep evolutionary history I explored in my post on LUCA ). Surprisingly, they are closer evolutionary cousins to animals than plants. In their earliest days, these organisms likely lived in water and possessed flagella . But a...

In 1969, computational linguistics was at an impasse. A powerful theorem suggested that neither machines nor humans could learn language without explicit instruction. J.J. Horning, with a brilliant application of statistics, shattered that assumption. His breakthrough laid the conceptual groundwork for how modern artificial intelligence, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, processes the structure of human speech. The Problem: Gold's Pessimism To understand the weight of Horning's contribution, we must first look at the "pessimism" he confronted. Before Horning, E.M. Gold had published Gold's Theorem , arguing that even simple languages could not be "identified in the limit" (learned) if the learner only saw positive examples. In Gold's model, "positive examples" are simply correct sentences ("The astronomer saw stars"). To learn which sentences are incorrect ("Saw astronomer the stars"), Gold argued that a learner ...