This paper evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive fan effects, similar to those discovered by Anderson in humans, after being pre-trained on human textual data. We conduct two sets of in-context recall experiments designed to elicit fan effects. Consistent with human results, we find that LLM recall uncertainty, measured via token probability, is influenced by the fan effect. Our results show that removing uncertainty disrupts the observed effect. The experiments suggest the fan effect is consistent whether the fan value is induced in-context or in the pre-training data. Finally, these findings provide in-silico evidence that fan effects and typicality are expressions of the same phenomena.

Though "The Last of Us Part II" ended 2020 as the year's most highly acclaimed title, it arrived last summer in a flurry of controversy. In the aforementioned scene, the main character of the first game, Joel Miller, was brutally murdered by a new character and protagonist to the series, Abby Anderson. In a cabin besieged by a heavy snowstorm, Abby reached for a nearby set of golf clubs to deal the fatal blow that left many players horrified, saddened, and in some cases, incredibly angry.

We've had an amazing turn out for the second FB live-coding event! Thanks to all that joined Hugo Bowne-Anderson in December in submitting several submissions to Kaggle's infamous Titanic Machine Learning Competition!. For those that missed it, here is a recap to find all the useful links and notebooks to take you from zero to one with machine learning in Python.

So wrote Wired's Chris Anderson in 2008. It kicked up a little storm at the time, as Anderson, the magazine's editor, undoubtedly intended. For example, an article in a journal of molecular biology asked, "…if we stop looking for models and hypotheses, are we still really doing science?" The answer clearly was supposed to be: "No." But today -- not even a decade since Anderson's article -- the controversy sounds quaint.

So wrote Wired's Chris Anderson in 2008. It kicked up a little storm at the time, as Anderson, the magazine's editor, undoubtedly intended. For example, an article in a journal of molecular biology asked, "…if we stop looking for models and hypotheses, are we still really doing science?" The answer clearly was supposed to be: "No." But today -- not even a decade since Anderson's article -- the controversy sounds quaint.

Grindr is coming of age. Over the weekend, the app founded by Joel Simkhai celebrated its 8th birthday. Almost a decade and more than 10 million app users worldwide later, the company is eager to get rid of its "gay hookup app" image, and establish itself as a lifestyle brand instead. Following a much buzzed-about partnership with designer J.W. Anderson in 2016, plus a Paris fashion week party earlier this year, the company will launch its online magazine titled Into, today. The media platform required a full year of preparations and is headed by former Wonderland magazine Production Director, Oly Innes.

This year, the Robotics Exhibition included two such robotics challenge problems: manipulation and learning by demonstration. In the Small-Scale Manipulation Challenge four teams demonstrated systems playing robotic chess. This exhibit was organized by David Touretzky and Monica D. Anderson. In the Learning by Demonstration Challenge, three teams demonstrated systems learning a block-sorting task. This exhibit was organized by Sonia Chernova. Additionally, this year marked another successful turnout for the Robotics Education Track, organized by Zachary Dodds, which highlights student-and educator-led robotics projects. In this article we give a summary of these three components of the exhibition.