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Probabilistic Models of Cognition

probmods.org Books & learning Books & long-form works AI & data Candidate

Resurfaced independently across 8 calendar years, with breakout response in 2 of them.

submissions
12
submitters
11
observed span
2014–2025
peak thread · 16 comments
173 pts
latest 20+ return · 2022-03-08
97 pts

Submission timeline

2007–2026

One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.

First comments on top threads

HN comment order

I'd like to mention that the research center behind this, the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), has a great youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGoxKRfTs0jQP52cfHCyyRQ Some of my favourite videos: - Neural Representations of Language Meaning - Tom Mitchell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRBf8BWAG3k - Computational cognitive science - Josh Tenenbaum (co-author of probmods) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WQO9e5Mdj4

Good reading. Nice introduction that explains when approaching AI development it's difficult to provide a computer with an exact rigid mechanical model of how the world works, and that's not how we think anyway, but rather we store a lot of small inference models we learned of how things work in general, and then we recall these simple rules to make guesses on what will probably happen in each situation, hence the probabilistic approach to cognition.

snorkel·116-point thread·

The Lisp version (Church) is here[0]. The current version is just a JavaScript library. [0]: http://v1.probmods.org/

Another tutorial by some of the same people which pulls back the covers on the apparent magic in probabilistic programming: http://dippl.org/

The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.

Breakout years
2

100+ points or 50+ comments

Total points
490

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Total comments
36

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Every submission

DateTitle as submittedByPointsComments
2014-01-15Probabilistic Models of Cognitionprogrammer_babu10
2014-04-01Probabilistic Models of Cognitionrrtwo10
2014-06-27Probabilistic Models of CognitionFirst breakoutAnon841169
2015-04-15Probabilistic Models of Cognitionpoppingtonic801
2015-05-06Probabilistic Models of Cognitiondeegles60
2017-02-02Probabilistic Models of CognitionBest threadpizza17316
2021-12-16Probabilistic Models of Cognition (2016)Tomte30
2022-03-08Probabilistic Models of CognitionLatest 20+ point returngraderjs978
2023-11-14Probabilistic Models of CognitionMovingTheLimit10
2024-03-05Probabilistic Models of Cognitiontosh31
2025-03-20Probabilistic Models of Cognitionyamrzou20
2025-05-23Probabilistic Models of CognitionTomte71