Markov Musings

“Problem Solving is Often a Matter of Cooking Up an Appropriate Markov Chain”.

Olle Häggström cooked with this one.

But I would like to distill it a little more. “Problem solving is often a matter of ensuring Markov’s “memoryless” property in between the steps”. And this is an incredibly hard thing to do. Having a full, low-noise (albeit compressed, or well-approximated) embedding of what has been done so far up until any point in time is hard. But once accomplished – solving a problem can even be boiled down to a look-up table from where familiar patterns are retrieved.