Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, Anil Ananthaswamy, c. 2024 / 2025
Chapter 5: Birds of a Feather
page 149: the search for nearest neighbors -- this is a really, really cool chapter --
begins with the Islamic Golden Age and the work of Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al Haytham, or Alhazen, a Muslim Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, link here.
the "father of modern optics" for his revolutionary Book of Optics. He Correctly explained vision by light reflection rather than emission, developed the scientific method, and made major contributions to physics, astronomy, and mathematics
page 150
Marcello Pelillo, a computer scientist at the University of Venice, Italy, had been doing his best to draw attention to Alhazen's ideas.
- stumbled upon this book in a New Haven, CT, bookstore: Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler.
- the late 1990s: Pelillo was than visiting professor at Yale
- doing research in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning;
- a slim book -- just 200 pages
- the author argued that Alhazen was "the most significant figure in the history of optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century."
- intromission: wiki; light entering the eye, correct;
- extramission: wrong; eyes emit rays to "touch" objects; wiki;
- coherent explanation of vision.
This was key, from Alhazen, noted by Pelillo:
"When sight perceives some visible object, the faculty of discrimination immediately seeks its counterpart among the forms persisting in the imagination, and when it finds some form in the imagination that is like the form of that visible object, it will recognize that visible object and will perceive what kind of thing it is."
page 152:
Pelillo
Alhazen
the algorithm -- the "nearest neighbor (NN) rule":
Thomas Cover: a young, whip-smart information theorist and electrical engineer at Stanford;
Peter Hart: precocious graduate student,
page 155:
the first mathematical mention of the nearest neighbor rule appeared in a 1951 (the year I was born) technical report of the USAF School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Field, Texas....the authors were Evelyn Fix and Joseph L. Hodges, Jr.
In 1940: Evelyn Fix came to work at the University of California, Berkeley, as a research assistant in the Statistical Laboratory, assigned to a project for the National Defense Research Committee. US researchers were getting drawn into the war waging in Europe....
... Fix received her PhD in 1948, stayed on at UC-Berkeley...
... came in touch with Joseph L. Hodges, Jr, and they produced the technical report of 1951 -- the question, of course, is how these two were the USAF School of Aviation Medicine.
As a graduate student looking for a doctoral thesis topic related to pattern recognition, Peter Hart stumbled upon the Fix and Hodges paper and the nearest neighbor rule. The rest is history, as they say.
The nearest neighbor rule. Link here.
Evelyn Fix, wiki. Berkeley Statistics: link here.
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