The first time I heard of it was in this Matt Parker video where he helped do this with a school-sized group of kids [0]. An "AI player" made of matchboxes, run by schoolkids, is a fantastically fun idea.
I have no idea who/when/where the 'original' idea came from. I stumbled on it when I was thinking about history and trying to tell how languages or artifacts influenced one another. I remember reading (don't know where) about linguists creating timelines based on when features appeared and capturing the version of that feature at the time it was introduced compared to how it later evolved. Again, a long time ago so no real definitive answers there. A quick search brought this paper up.[1] I just skimmed it and it looks like it has the core idea in it but no promises.
3blue1brown has a great series of videos on the central limit theorem, and it makes me wish there were something similar covering the generalised form in a similar format. I have a textbook on my reading list that covers it, unfortunately I'm I can't seem to find it or the title right now. (edit: it's "The Fundamentals of Heavy Tails" by Nair, Wierman, and Zwart from 2022)
Do you have any good sources for the physics angle?
Version control is fantastic, and you can get quite creative with it too. Git scraping for example (https://simonwillison.net/2021/Dec/7/git-history/). But as nice as Git is, people who are not trained to be a software developer or computer scientist often don't have a lot of exposure to it, and when they do it's a relatively big step to learn to use it. In my mechanical engineering studies we had to do quite a bit of programming, but none of my group mates ever wanted to use version control, not even on bigger projects. The Jacquard notebook and other Ink&Switch projects are aimed at people with non-software backgrounds, which is quite nice to see :)
I had the same thought - researchers who are used to having their workflows in VS Code, for example, could be missing out on a lot of tools that they are used to. I'm their description they talk about how they want to meet researchers where they're at, "building bridges" to existing workflows and software. So I'm hopeful that they will consider integrating with popular programming and data analysis set-ups. The project seems to be just getting started so it'll be interesting to see where this goes :)
Thanks for all your input! How long does it usually take you to complete a single update? I'm curious about helping out with the effort in my neighbourhood.
I use StreetComplete (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), and have added substantial amounts of data to my city. It just asks simple objective questions (Does this crosswalk have a light to tell pedestrians when to cross?). Very easy and quick to answer.
I installed it last night and their flow seems very simple, yeah. Does it allow you to, for example, add missing streets or paths that aren't marked as missing? Because it sounds like it only lets you contribute to things that are already marked as "needs more data"
StreetComplete is fairly limited in scope (which is a good thing, considering its focus on UX and doing that single thing really well).
But there are a bunch of more “expert” features, such as the overlays, which allow for more focused QA work. And there's also a way of recording a GPX trace for missing paths or streets that will be added as a note for others to add to the map (or yourself, just not from the same app). Just long-press the screen and you can start such a recording.
With the places or things overlays you can also add new POIs in a limited way. It's still not a full-fleded editor (and as mentioned before, I think it shouldn't be), but there are now ways of doing more edits that were not possible previously, while not altering the interaction that much.
Yeah it feels like having a very focused editor with a polished workflow could help OSM get more people to contribute, although it would be very nice to maybe have an advanced mode I imagine. Places get new neighbourhoods all the time so it would be great to be able to rigourously modify maps from the same place you contribute from otherwise, although maybe a desktop experience would be much better for this.
I've noticed StreetComplete focuses on details to fill in an already existing street layout, which makes it feel like there are clearly separated stages to the mapping process. First get the basic layout down, then fill in more details like zoning and buildings, and then more details. I like the idea of that so far.
That's one of the examples he goes into in his talk, at a high level anyway. I'd love to find a write-up of someone who has done the detailed calculations of how likely alignments and shape occurrences are.
Another thing that would be interesting is to look at the effect of non-uniformly distributed birthdays. For example, the day that's nine months after valentine's day or christmas might (?) have a slightly higher number of births than an average day. Then you could look at what kind of an effect this would have on the probability of a common birthday as a function of group size.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU
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