Our hero, Shrek, was just one step away from saving princess Fiona and getting his beloved swamp back. However, the gate to the highest tower in the castle, where the princess was imprisoned, was guarded by a mighty Dragon. Fortunately, considered herself as an intellectual, Dragon refuses a battle of life and death, instead, she gave Shrek a puzzle to solve in order to pass through the door. It is as follows:

There was a time, scientists had to predict nature with pure reasoning and looked for affirmative from observations. There was a time, practitioners could barely scan through all the possible solutions to analyse the correctness of a problem, and thus had to ask for help from mathematicians. And, there was a time, when mathematics listed a method as hard to solve (in terms of polynomial time) in principle then it came out to be a good fit in practice. Among those, there is Linear Programming (LP).

After September 12 Apple-event, the news of the new iPhone X and its cutting-edge facial recognition technology, namely FaceID, run all over the place. Besides a big leap in price in mobile-market making people suddenly be aware of their internal organ value, an inevitable question pops up about the reliability of FaceID. On one hand, it’s totally convenient to look at the screen and the phone automatically unlocks itself. On the other hand, such kind of privacy protection was proved to be imprecise from time to time and could be faked by a whole bunch of simple (or not) tricks: a photo of the owner, her video, or even a 3D model.

Last week was such an unforgettable experience, thus I want to get my hand dirty right away to prepare a solid foundation for the ahead journey. And there is nothing better to start with than one of James V Stone’s books: Bayes’ Rule A Tutorial Introduction to Bayesian Analysis.

Main Contributor: Nguyễn Ngọc Gia Hy