It's a very interesting talk - but the title is misleading (title is the same in the submission as in the source). Norvig focuses on statistical learning and how that can be used to infer the meaning of words and the appropriate results in searches, particularly image searches. How these approaches tie into agile development, or any software development really, is given at best a cursory pass with a couple mentions that I, for one, wasn't able to follow. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never did.<p>I'd love to be told that I'm wrong or that I'm missing something here, so if anyone wants to enlighten me on the connection, please go for it.
I'm particularly interested in the idea of distribution/statistical-test driven software testing. Instead of concrete assertions (truth assertions, equality assertions), we would make assertions about descriptive statistics or other tests. Or just assert that if we do something stochastic N times, we should expect some truth/equality test to pass at least M times.<p>I'm not sure what to do with that idea, but that's actually the core of why I posted this. Any other hackers out there excited by this idea?
The videolectures.net site is frustrating. On the one hand, it is a great collection of interesting talks. On the other hand, its annoying use of Windows Media means that I have to watch the talks in the browser, while I would much rather download them for watching on my iPhone.<p>Does anybody have a solution that would allow me to download these, convert (possibly with VisualHub) and watch on an iPhone/iPod?