Personal Narrative: My Machine Learning

I twiddled around with my phone, posting on internet forums, while I waited to see a famous smasher at any moment. My machine-learning model had indicated that there was an 80% chance that between the hours of 4 and 5 PM a smasher would be here. And sure enough, I heard a Luma giggling, running across the street, with a smiling woman in a dress chasing it. “Hey, wait up!” she called. I quickly hit the home key and snapped a picture of the scene, and so did several others. A few flashes appeared from people who had accidentally turned on their phone's camera flash and didn't know how to turn it off. After Rosalina crossed the street and managed to catch the Luma, she walked away, causing a wave of people holding phones to continue down

What gives?” “You fire fast, but without higher draw weights, those arrows aren't going to do much damage.” “Well, okay… if I remember...” This session, I borrowed a 40-lb left-land bow, and started shooting at different targets. The grip felt weird, which was expected for a stock bow, since I usually shot arrows from the “wrong” side of the bow. And Arnold was there to correct me. “Keep your left arm straight.” I focused on the target in front of me, straightening my left hand as suggested. I shot into the blue area. Then I loosened my bow hand, straightened out another arrow, and shot into the adjacent target. Blue. Then I went back to the target in front of me, and shot another arrow. Black. It took me about fifteen seconds to shoot all the arrows in my bow hand. While everyone else took their sweet time to shoot their five arrows, I looked over. Yes, I was still rather inaccurate. Arnold, who was right by me, finished second, borrowing some of my tricks, like holding the arrows in the bow hand. After that, we

But the technique you're trying to learn takes years, and you're just getting started. Don't get ahead of yourself.” Yes, he was right. I was six months into training, and I was still in my self-taught speed archery 101 course, trying to figure out how to ready arrows for firing in a single movement. Not to mention that my back and shoulder muscles weren't very strong. Still, my ambition was burning bright, and I ran back to the shooting line with gusto, ready to fire off another salvo of arrows. I held myself back from firing the arrows while people were still gathering arrows. The one time I failed to do that, I felt really stupid, even though my arrow was shot nowhere near the people still gathering arrows. The next 20 arrows were similar: my shots landed reasonably well into the huge targets, but I would need a lot more practice before the arrows landed in the bulls-eyes with any sort of regularity. After 5 such target sessions, I took a moment to dash around in the gimbal elliptical machine for ten minutes, then returned to the target field for accuracy training, taking 6 seconds on each arrow rather than the three I spent on each arrow earlier. The arrows still landed away from the bullseyes with frustrating regularity, but it was an improvement over 6 months ago, when I couldn't hit the target