Recently we posted an article on arxiv about a suprising duality between optimization problem with inequality constraints, particularly quadratic programming (QP), and one of the most famous models of ecological dynamics, MacArthur’s Consumer Resource Model (MCRM). Here I want to provide a very gentle introduction to some basic ideas in optimization and convex duality, which we invoked upon in this paper, to appease those who are distracted by these jargons. In the following, I draw heavily on the awesome book by Stephen Boyd and the CVX lecture notes from Ryan Tibshirani.

To keep the momentum going, here’s one tiny piece that I intend to post as a follow-up to the previous blog post. Disclaimer again: I’m just here blogging about my opinion based on my limited legal knowledge which I don’t even purport to comprehend fully.

Preamble

I recently finished reading Norbert Wiener’s incredible book ‘Cybernetics.’ Interestingly, soon after that, Pankaj (my advisor) sent me an inspirational article by Michael I. Jordan where he alerted the risk incurred by the misuse of “AI” as a placeholder nomenclature moving forward. Therein, Jordan referenced John McCarthy’s provision of intelligent systems based on the tie to logic as well as his attempt to sideline the intellectual field known as ‘cybernetics,’ a term Wiener coined in 1948 to refer to

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

Last December I. figured out the new year resolution for me– resume blogging. My guess is given that I’ve constantly been ranting and raving about jibberish at him, he thought it’d be fun to see if I can do that in words (and in public). To be honest, I found this idea utterly fantastic, for it forces me to think deepr before speaking of anything. On top of that, I also enjoy a place where we can have fun laughing at each others’ seriousness.

Last Friday I went to a talk given by a world-renowned evolutionary biologist at Harvard Medical School. At the beginning of the talk, the speaker methodically provided an overview of the development of evolutionary biology, both from the theoretical and empirical perspective. It was precisely when he attempted to address the historical transition from Darwin’s natural selection to Kimura’s neutral theory that one of the audience (a world-renown physicist at Harvard) made a comment that Wallace should’ve been included in Darwin’s clan. I sort of shuddered and made a frivolous rebuttal to argue otherwise. Well, the atmosphere was gaily and casual, so the talk went on. But that incident did impel me to ponder what do I make of things I uttered.