This weekend I found myself in a particularly drawn-out game of Chutes and Ladders with my four-year-old. If you've not had the pleasure of playing it, Chutes and Ladders (also sometimes known as Snakes and Ladders) is a classic kids board game wherein players roll a six-sided die to advance forward through 100 squares, using "ladders" to jump ahead, and avoiding "chutes" that send you backward. It's basically a glorified random walk with visual aids to help you build a narrative. Thrilling. But she's having fun practicing counting, learning to win and lose gracefully, and developing the requisite skills to be a passionate sports fan, so I play along.

On the approximately twenty third game of the morning, as we found ourselves in a near endless cycle of climbing ladders and sliding down chutes, never quite reaching that final square to end the game, I started wondering how much longer the game could last: what is the expected length of a game? How heavy are the tails of the game length distribution? How succinctly could I answer those questions in Python? And then, at some point, it clicked: Chutes and Ladders is memoryless — the effect of a roll depends only on where you are, not where you've been — and so it can be modeled as a Markov process! By the time we (finally) hit square 100, I basically had this blog post written, at least in my head.

When I tweeted about this, people pointed me to a number of similar treatments of Chutes & Ladders, so I'm under no illusion that this idea is original. Think of this as a blog post version of a dad joke: my primary goal is not originality, but self-entertainment, and if anyone else finds it entertaining that's just an added bonus.

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Global AI Summit in the bay area. This is my personal trip report about the people I have met and some of the projects and startups I came across.

AI is eating the world.

First of all, let me start by saying that literally everybody is doing (or claiming to do) AI in the bay area. AI has inflamed the spirits of pretty much every single software engineer, data scientist, business developer, talent scout, and VC in the greater San Francisco area.

All tools and services presented at the conference embed some form of machine intelligence, and scientists are the new cool kids on the block. Software engineering has probably reached an all-time low in terms of coolness in the bay area, and regarded almost as the "necessary evil" in order to unleash the next AI interface. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, as actually Machine Learning and AI are more like the raisins in raisin bread, as Peter Norvig and Marcos Sponton say.

After nine months on Octopress, I've decided to move on.

I should start by saying that Octopress is a great platform for static blogging: it's powerful, flexible, well-supported, well-integrated with GitHub pages, and has tools and plugins to do just about anything you might imagine. There's only one problem:

It's written in Ruby.

Now I don't have anything against Ruby per se. However, it was starting to seem a bit awkward that a blog called Pythonic Perambulations was built with Ruby, especially given the availability of so many excellent Python-based static site generators (Hyde, Nikola, and Pelican in particular).

Additionally, a few things with Octopress were starting to become difficult: