July 16: Ahh... The wonders of stats and probability... Shoot!: SUCCESS!
Today I woke up and had dorm breakfast of natto and a salted, baked fish that had reddish flesh, but the skin looked kind of like mackerel. Oh, and miso soup and rice. How could I forget? ;D Secret: I didn't.
I got to work on time and got working on my CGS (collapsed Gibbs sampling) Multinomial Mixture recommender, and by about 2pm I had it behaving rather nicely. Now, wasn't that painless!? Kabutoya-san had supplied me with his own Mixture Model using EM after taking pity on my inability to make mine consistent, and after I had my CGS one together, I took a look at it. I found one part that was different, but it was different theoretically, meaning I had made a mistake in my derivation that he hadn't caught. I implemented the change, and my model seemed to give much more stable results! HOWEVER, when I decided, for the hell of it, to run performance tests on Kabutoya-san's MM, I kept getting very low performance, which must be a mistake, as he said that his was consistently decent. I will ask him about it tomorrow when I report my results for how varying the number of latent topics in my MM with CGS affects performance.
At lunchtime I had curry tsuke-men, which consists of a bowl of chilled ramen noodes served with a bowl of curried ramen broth and various goodies. I liked it, due to the curry-ness, but it was a little too salty to be called "good". I played handiball after eating, and today there were only 6 of us playing, which meant beach-style! Hooray! I was much better at it than 4-on-4, as expected haha. >_<
After lunch, I finished off coding my MM with CGS recommender and reported to Kabutoya-san. He gave me two new papers, tasked me with testing the performance of it with respect to various values of Z (the number of latent topics), and told me that next Tuesday (not this coming) I will make another presentation. My presentation will be on my mixture model with CGS, incremental PLSA (probabilistic latent semantic analysis, a cousin of my mixture model and a previous topic of study, as well as the subject of today's new papers), and LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) using CGS. Kabutoya-san says that the LDA part of the presentation is actually the most important, as many people in PIG (my group within the lab) are very interested in LDA, but do not have the time to study up on it, especially given that the papers laying them out are in English (I don't think there are Japanese equivalents). I am a little apprehensive about this, because as far as I understand, I will essentially be lecturing on it, despite having no practical experience and having only been introduced to it in the past week or so. >_< Presuure, pressure. Bleagh. At least it's also an exciting way to give back haha (I'll be focusing on that to avoid freaking out completely).
I spent the rest of the day reading papers and writing and twiddling with performance tests. My CGS MM runs much faster than Kabutoya-san's PLSA and my EM MM, so I have written a totally monster test for it, haha. I'm varying Z from 10 to 100 by steps of 5, and each value will have 5 trials (as, like EM, CGS is an approximation algorithm that yields different results on different trials). I hope I haven't gotten overzealous and that it's done by tomorrow morning haha.
I got kicked out of the office at 6:30 today. Unfortunately I will have to stop trying to stay late, as today Kabutoya-san said that the manager (whoever that may be) could actually get angry if I stay truly late. Yikes! I will have to make a point of leaving by 6:15-ish in the future. I suspect I will be breaking this rule a lot though, as when you're debugging and you have an idea you want to try it NOW! And it always takes about three times as long as you'd expect to implement the change haha. >_<
I walked home from work and tried to buy a tape measure for measuring my suitcase at the dollar store, but no such luck was to be found. D: I am going make a quick trip to Seiyu on either Monday (if it's open on the holiday) or Wednesday/Thursday. I have verified that they close at 8pm on Sunday, so tomorrow is not an option.
At the dorm I ate dorm dinner of ground beef in green peppers, harusame with various chopped pale vegetables, tiny fish on grated daikon and miso soup with puffy tofu (my favourite variant ;D). Niconico-san (I really need to get to know his name >_<) was there heating up his own dinner from elsewhere, and I asked him about board games. He said that Yao (also from the dormitory) is the board-game dude, who arrived shortly after Niconico-san mentioned him. It turns out that he bought Dominion last week! Haha awesomeee! He just got Seaside today and wanted to play, but Niconico-san was not available. They said that they will come get me when they do end up playing, which is super exciting! It turns out Niconico-san liked Age of Empires a lot in high school, and was very interested in being shown StarCraft at some point! ;D My life here is getting very, very exciting haha! I'm sure you can tell this by the number of exclamation points present in that last paragraph. ;D
I thought I was done for the night; sitting down and blogging, when literally as I was writing the last paragraph, Yao-san appeared and said he had found different players for Dominion! It's now 12:30, meaning that I just played Dominion for like, 2.5 hours haha. We only played 3 games, because they're mostly newer and they take long turns (that and the first game was a Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no Moat/Lighthouse snoozefest that ended with ONE province purchased). I won 1/3 games, as I grossly mismanaged my Wharf/Fishing Village/Merchant Ship (I over-Wharfed, typical me haha) against mass Treasury in the second game and lost by 2 points. >_< In the last game I cleaned up with a 8+ point lead by abusing ridiculous Tactician/Outpost/Warehouse/Remodel craziness (playing an Outpost on a Tactician turn and then playing the Tactician on the Outpost turn while denying other people Provinces by remodeling my own into more Provinces hahaha). I had a really good time, and I hope they did too, as I would LOVE to play again. They were picking up on my Remodel usage, so maybe they will keep me around to steal my card combos at least haha. Hopefully they will listen to me next time when I say that Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no defense is not a recipe for good times! ;D
For now, I'd best mention random things about the day before heading straight to bed to be ready for work tomorrow (paper reading, my greatest weakness >_<;;). First, there was another earthquake last night when I was in my room. I seem to recall hearing that regular earthquakes happen in clusters (which would make sense), and I believe if there are many in "quick" succession, I should get worried, as apparently earthquake "swarms" are a warning sign for larger quakes. The trouble is that I don't know what "quick" and "swarm" mean haha. For now I'm not worried though, as I'm pretty sure that two minor ones in a week is not a swarm haha. Second, there is a man (at least I'm guessing it's a man hahah >_<) at the office who sneezes like Uncle Neil! Well, obviously he's a little quieter, or you'd know about it back in Canada (especially the Kootenays), right? ;D
Anyways, I think that's all for today. Hopefully I didn't forget something major due to my blogging being interrupted by hours of Dominion. Night!
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