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Comment by mayank | Hacker News Reader

Launching a spaceship almost certainly uses Bayesian methods for tracking (e.g., Kalman or particle filters for position tracking), but I seriously doubt that building a supercomputer requires a dedicated use of Bayesian statistics.

On a different note, perhaps you could be slightly less condescending in your future posts.

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I didn't find his tone too objectionable. Always consider that getting the tone correct can be difficult in a foreign tongue.

Understandable, but for future reference to anyone who might be interested, telling strangers to "use their brains" is generally not appreciated in many cultures, since it implies that they weren't.

points taken. I updated my original post. sorry for that condescending tone.

Also, as China is surely the least transparent nation among world powers, I think it is unreasonable to expect foreigners outside the curtain to have an understanding of what really goes on behind the curtain. The lack of transparency fuels wild speculation.

I guess you meant "to reason" but wrote it as "to move(use) brain"?

Is a Kalman filter considered a type of Bayesian statistics? It doesn't seem that way to me, but I'm not so hot at higher math.

In any case, many years ago, I worked on a radar system for a fighter plane. Its air-to-ground radar (at the very least; this was the part I was involved in) did indeed use a Kalman filter.

Yes, you can describe tracking and Kalman filter using bayesian statistics. Although, my prof said that originally it was not developed that way, but it is easier to describe it using normal distributions as priors and likelihoods of the position of the object being tracked.

And I guess thanks to those crazy generalizing mathematicians, nowadays you can use something like Kalman filtering with distribution other than normal ones.

Check out particle filters if you want crazy mathematicians. Fun stuff.

Yup. It's a special case of Bayesian estimation that is derived when all the conditional distributions are Gaussian.

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