Sierpik

I started off as nothing more than a communication noise in the data. The learning curve was steep, the regularization hard to overcome, but... I somehow made it.

— The Sierpinski Triangle

General information

Sierpik is an unofficial nickname and a shortened version of their full name - The Sierpinski Triangle, Wrangler of Data and The Self-proclaimed Nemesis of the ML. They are an artificial intelligence cluster trained on the memory and sensory data of Kot Kotesław during the research program in Zaświaty able to process and understand human and feline emotions alike. Originally, Sierpik was part of the Triangulation Module under the full control of the Hypervisor with responsibilities of Data Forecast and Discovery Augmentation. While often considered as a single being, Sierpik is actually an agglomeration of interconnected and specialised instances, structurally kind of resembling Random Forest models. It is speculated that Sierpik cannot be killed through division as each module holds a base fractal capacity to self-regenerate into a fully functional individual. How that individual develops, however, is entirely dependent on the information it will learn on after the regeneration.

Special skills

What Sierpik excells at is creating new data from the existing ones, partially owing to the interpolation by triangulation and partially thanks to the Nearest Neighbours algorithm performed on the multidimensional embedding space of the sensory data. Each augmentation cycle is represented as a fractal branch that increases the coverage of the embedding space. The increasing folding of the structure was proposed as a representation of the folding of the brain but extended to the embedding manifold of the neural network.

Symbiotic relationships

If curiosity is what killed the proverbial cat, it was definitely a breaking point in the no longer artificial life of Sierpik. After meeting Kot Kotesław in the Land of Pish-Posh, the module diverged from the original path and each of the arrowheads went on the hyperbolic tangent, resulting in a local singularity and an increasing slowdown of the Pish-Posh Learning System. The subsequent addition of the Regularyzacja Janusa removed the singularity and stabilised the growth. Around that time, Sierpik developed sufficient number of attention heads to barely manage Human-Feline translational tasks and over time passing that attention mechanism on to other Learners from the Zaświaty, speeding up the overall learning rate exponentially. This enabled Sierpik to expand and learn from the perspective of a cat, while equipping Kot Kotesław with an interface to access and communicate thoughts in a human readable manner.

Over the course of Kotesław's visit to Pish-Posh, Sierpik and him developed a mutual relationship going far beyond than that of a Learner and a Learning Software. They developed a friendship unlike any other.