Better Than Rules: How Bayesian Theory Is The New If Statement

Re:Better Than Rules: How Bayesian Theory Is The New If Stat... by tocomment on Thursday April 19, 2007 @12:44PM (#14665)

I certainly see how a Bayesian theory is useful, but I can't fathom how to use it instead of an if statement. What does that even mean? What would it look like? Can anyone enlighten me?

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Re:Better Than Rules: How Bayesian Theory Is The New If Stat... by npk on Thursday April 19, 2007 @03:49PM (#14748)

It's a platitude. The full quotation and context is here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html

I read the "very senior Microsoft developer"'s point as something like: because if statements are so fundamental, most lowly MS programmers think in terms of them. Google, hires programmers who've taken a course in machine learning or something, and use statistical inference (a bunch of if statements, just with some abstraction) instead of lookup tables (a bunch of if statements.)

Yawn. This is just Google PR speak. The quotation doesn't really mean if statements will go away, it just means that you need to think at a "higher level." This is just someone saying "X is smarter than Y."

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