Ángel Casas Pescador

Artificial intelligence has seen a rise in popularity, over the past few years, due to the development of new architectures and increased availability of data.
It is my intent to begin a series of posts describing some of the biggest achievements of machine learning algorithms with the help of some famous examples. This posts are the work of a machine learning student with the strong intention and risk of entering the A.I. field. Being this my own subjective experience in the field mistakes are assured. So, in an attempt to learn from my mistakes it is my wish, for anyone who can comment about my posts, to point out this flaws or simply to give further information or personal thoughts. I apologize in advanced for the lengthy introduction and, while keeping this in mind, lets get started.

Great Pioneers

Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing

Two great minds of the 19-20th Century both were incredible mathematicians and presented the bases of Computer Science and programmable machines. They both produced the very first algorithms to be used by machines setting a milestone in the development of programmable machines. When I first learned about them I was blown away by the precision and clear understanding they had about algorithms and coding knowledge into a machine.
Alan Turing famously proposed what was later to be called as a Universal Turing machine, meaning a machine capable of working on one task but with the capacity to change its programming to work on a wide range of tasks(Theoretically any task which can be done by a human using pen and paper). I recommend reading The Essential Turing to have a clear understanding of his ideas for those of you who also love Artificial Intelligence.
In my next post I will continue to go deeper into the history of Machine Learning before moving on to some excellent projects from our recent days. -Participation and ideas to expand this series of posts are welcomed and greatly appreciated -
Work in Progress.

Bitcoin is a new technological innovation providing a solution to a very old problem of how to transact something of value between two or more entities in private and with a mutually trusted means of exchange. Money, which has been a central part of our civilization and of our ability to interact with each other, is now becoming fully digitalized into the internet space. Everytime there has been a new form of transfering value available to broader and broader populations it has ushered in a new era of technological inoovations and an increase in prosperity of it's users. With Bitcoin we are seeing this same revolution happening again, but with this revolution we are being handed a technology which has a global scope we have never seen before. Lets think about some of the implications of this:

• With a global audience you can now transfer value between any number of people anywhere in the world.
• Permission is not needed from a third party to allow a transaction to take place, only the approval of both entities involved.
• Your money can now be safely stored and accesed from anywhere in the world,which stops the risks from moving money across borders.
• A completely deflationary commodity with a fixed number of units in existance is for the first time in our history a truly scarce commodity.

The full implications of this will only be clear in the future and for now our most important oportunity is to bring awareness and improvements into the Bitcoin ecosystem to allow everyone with a growing interest to understand and to have easy access to such a technological revolution. Before closing this post I want to provide a key set of ideas to keep in mind always when working and trying to understand this technology. Andreas Antonopoulos, a very prominent speaker in the Bitcoin space, has been very precise about this key ideas and serves as a great synthesis to what we will be covering in future posts:

• Open: Available to anyone.
• Borderless: Accessible from anywhere.
• Decentralized: No single point of power concentration which can be exploited.
• Censorship-resistant: Inaccesible to any form of control or suppression.
• Neutral: Provides a useful service without any implications in political or moral landscapes.

As a closure to this first post I want to bring into your attention a detail about the original inventor of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym of the mind (or group of minds) behind the initial development of Bitcoin in 2009 and, to this date, remain anonymous and will probably remain that way for the forseeable future. In my next post titled BitcoinLiberal I will be going into a little more detail about how Bitcoin was concieved and its evolution during this ten years. Remember, any new technological innovation requires some initial time to be devoted towards understanding it so allow yourself to be puzzled by this amazing development without loosing track of its main usefulness which, in this global landscape of central banks and cyclical debt spiral, is to free every individual from the devaluation of their savings by central banks controling money printing through Quantitative Easing.

Please comment any suggestions or improvements I may have been unaware of and lets improve our understanding together!