This week
- Lecture
- 15 March 2027 Statistics, and the fluent join
- Slides
- Open the deck
Bench
- Material
- signage from before 2016
- Operation
- locating the join
- Leaves
- a dated estimate and the reasoning behind it
A statistical system does not fail at a word. It fails at a join.
Before
Bring one artefact you believe predates 2016: a product manual, a hotel notice, a tourist brochure, a museum caption. Older signage is harder to find than it sounds, and finding it is half the exercise.
In the bench
Mark the join. Read the output aloud and stop at the first point where the sentence stops being about the same thing as the source. That point is usually a phrase boundary, and its position tells you roughly how long the units were that the system was assembling.
Then argue about the date. Nothing on a sign says when it was translated, so you are dating it from the shape of its errors, which is exactly the move the whole course is built on and the first time you are asked to do it under pressure.
Afterwards
The reconstruction assignment opens this week. If the artefact you brought today survived the room, it is a candidate.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have marked where in the output the source stopped being followed
- you have a dated estimate of when the artefact was produced, with your reasoning
- you have said what a lookup-table explanation cannot account for here
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor