## Modulus and Hidden Symmetries

research

A really nice research paper, titled The Hidden Symmetries of the Multiplication Table was posted over in the Math Ed Community yesterday. The key ideas in the article center around (a) the standard multiplication table—with a row of numbers at the top, a column of numbers down the left, and the products of those numbers in the body of the table, and (b) modulus. In particular, what patterns emerge in the standard multiplication table when products are colored by equivalence to $$\mathtt{n \bmod k}$$ as $$\mathtt{k}$$ is varied?

The little interactive tool below shows a large multiplication table (you can figure out the dimensions), which starts by coloring those products which are equivalent to $$\mathtt{0 \bmod 12}$$, meaning those products which, when divided by 12 give a remainder of zero (in other words, multiples of 12).

mod

When you vary $$\mathtt{k}$$, you can see some other pretty cool patterns (broken up occasionally by the boring patterns produced by primes). Observing the patterns produced by varying the remainder, $$\mathtt{n}$$, is left as an exercise for the reader (and me).

Incidentally, I’ve wired up the “u” and “d” keys, for “up” and “down.” Just click in one of the boxes and press the “u” or “d” key to vary $$\mathtt{k}$$ or $$\mathtt{n}$$ without having to retype and press Return every time. And definitely go look at the paper linked above. They’ve got some other beautiful images and interesting questions.

Barka, Z. (2017). The Hidden Symmetries of the Multiplication Table Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 7 (1), 189-203 DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.201701.15

## Teach Me My Colors

In the box below, you can try your hand at teaching a program, a toy problem, to reliably identify the four colors red, blue, yellow, and green by name.

You don’t have a lot of flexibility, though. Ask the program to show you one of the four colors, and then provide it feedback as to its response—in that order. Then repeat. That’s all you’ve got. That and your time and endurance.

Of course, I’d love to leave the question about the meaning of “reliably identify the four colors” to the comments, but let’s say that the program knows the colors when it scores 3 perfect scores in a row—that is, if you cycle through the 4 colors three times in a row, and the program gets a 4 out of 4 all three times.

Just keep in mind that closing or refreshing the window wipes out any “learning.” Kind of like summer vacation. Or winter break. Or the weekend.

Death, Taxes, and the Mind

The teaching device above is a toy problem because it is designed to highlight what I believe to be the most salient feature of instruction—the fact that we don’t know a lot about our impact. Can you not imagine someone becoming frustrated with the “teaching” above, perhaps feverishly wondering what’s going on in the “mind” of the program? Ultimately, the one problem we all face in education is this unknown about students’ minds and about their learning—like the unknown of how the damn program above works, if it even does.

One can think of the collective activity of education as essentially the group of varied responses to this situation of fundamental ambiguity and ignorance. And similarly, there are a variety of ways to respond to the painful want of knowing solicited by this toy problem:

Seeing What You Want to See
Pareidolia is the name given to an occurrence where people perceive a pattern that isn’t there—like the famous “face” on Mars (just shadows, angles, and topography). This can happen when incessantly clicking on the teaching device above too. In fact, these kinds of pattern-generating hypotheses jumped up sporadically in my mind as I played with the program, and I wrote the program. For example, I noticed on more than one occasion that if I took a break from incessant clicking and came back, the program did better on that subsequent trial. And between sessions, I was at one point prepared to say with some confidence that the program simply learned a specific color faster than the others. There are a huge number of other, related superstitions that can arise. If you think they can only happen to technophobes and the elderly, you live in a bubble.

Constantly Shifting Strategies
It might be optimal to constantly change up what you’re doing with the teaching device, but trying to optimize the program’s performance over time is probably not why you do it. Frustration with a seeming lack of progress and following little mini-hypotheses about short-term improvements are more likely candidates. A colleague of mine used to characterize the general orientation to work in education as the “Wile E. Coyote approach”—constantly changing strategies rather than sticking with one and improving on it. The darkness is to blame.

Letting the Activity Judge You
This may be a bit out in left field, but it’s something I felt while doing the toy problem “teaching,” and it is certainly caused by the great unknown here—guilt. Did I remember to give feedback that last time? My gosh, when was the last time I gave it? Am I the only one who can’t figure this out, who is having such a hard time with this? (Okay, I didn’t experience that last one, but I can imagine someone experiencing it.) It seems we will happily choose even the distorted feel-bad projections of a hyperactive conscience over the irritating blankness of not knowing. Yet, while we might find some consolation in the truth that we’re too hard on ourselves, we also have the unhappy task of remembering that a thousand group hugs and high-fives are even less effective than a clinically diagnosable level of self-loathing at turning unknowns into knowns.

Conjecturing and Then Testing
This, of course, is the response to the unknown that we want. For the toy problem in particular, what strategies are possible? Can I exhaust them all? What knowledge can I acquaint myself with that will shine light on this task? How will I know if my strategy is working?

Here’s a plot I made of one of my runs through, using just one strategy. Each point represents a test of all 4 colors, and the score represents how many colors the program identified correctly.

Was the program improving? Yes. The mean for the first 60 trials was approximately 1.83 out of 4 correct, and the mean for the back 63 was approximately 2.14 out of 4. That’s a jump from about 46% to about 54%.

Is that the best that can be done? No. But that’s just another way the darkness gets ya—it makes it really hard to let go of hard-won footholds.

Knowing Stuff

Some knowledge about how the human mind works is analogous to knowing something about how programs work in the case of this toy problem. Such knowledge makes it harder to be bamboozled by easy to vary explanations. And in general such knowledge works like all knowledge does—it keeps you away, defeasibly, from dead-ends and wrong turns so that your cognitive energy is spent more productively.

Knowing something about code, for example, might instantly give you the idea to start looking for it in the source for this page. It’s just a right click away, practically. But even if you don’t want to “cheat,” you can notice that the program serves up answers even prior to any feedback, which, if you know something about code, would make you suspect that they might be generated randomly. Do they stay random, or do they converge based on feedback? And what hints does this provide about the possible functioning of the program? These better questions are generated by knowledge about typical behavior, not by having a vast amount of experience with all kinds of toy problem teaching devices.

How It Works

So, here’s how it works. The program contains 4 “registers,” or arrays, one for each of the 4 colors—blue, red, green, yellow. At the beginning of the training, each of those registers contains the exact same 4 items: the 4 different color names. So, each register looks like this at the beginning: [‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’].

Throughout the training, when you ask the program to show you a color, it chooses a random one from the register. This behavior never changes. It always selects a random color from the array. However, when you provide feedback, you change the array for that color. For example, if you ask the program to show you blue, and it shows you blue, and you select the “Yes” feedback from the dropdown, a “blue” choice is added to the register. So, if this happened on the very first trial, the “blue” register would change from [‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’] to [‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’]. If, on the other hand, you ask for blue on the very first trial, and the program shows you green, and you select the “No” feedback from the dropdown, the 3 colors that are NOT green are added to the “blue” register. In that case, the “blue” register would change from [‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’] to [‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’].

A little math work can reveal that positive feedback on the first trial moves the probability of randomly selecting the correct answer from 0.25 to 0.4. For negative feedback, there is still a strengthening of the probability, but it is much smaller: from 0.25 to about 0.29. These increases decrease over time, of course, as the registers fill up with color names. For positive feedback on the second trial, the probability would strengthen from 0.4 to 0.5. For negative feedback, approximately 0.29 to 0.3.

Thus, in some sense, you can do no harm here so long as your feedback matches the truth—i.e., you say no when the answer is incorrect and yes when it is correct. The probability of a correct answer from the program always gets stronger over time with appropriate feedback. Can you imagine an analogous conclusion being offered from education research? “Always provide feedback” seems to be the inescapable conclusion here.

But a limit analysis provides a different perspective. Given an infinite sequence of correct-answer-only trials $$\mathtt{C(t)}$$ and an infinite sequence of incorrect-answer-only trials $$\mathtt{I(t)}$$, we get these results:

$\mathtt{\lim_{t\to\infty} C(t) = \lim_{t\to\infty}\frac{t + 1}{t + 4} = 1, \qquad \lim_{t\to\infty} I(t) = \lim_{t\to\infty}\frac{t + 1}{3t + 4} = \frac{1}{3}}$

These results indicate that, over time, providing appropriate feedback only when the program makes a correct color identification strengthens the probability of correct answers from 0.25 to 1 (a perfect score), whereas the best that can be hoped for when providing feedback only when the program gives an incorrect answer is just a 1-in-3 shot at getting the correct answer. When both negative and positive feedback are given, I believe a similar analysis shows a limit of 0.5, assuming an equal number of both types of feedback.

Of course, the real-world trials bear out this conclusion. The data graphed above are from my 123 trials giving both correct and incorrect feedback. Below are data from just 67 trials giving feedback only on correct answers. The program hits the benchmark of 3 perfect scores in a row at Trial 53, and, just for kicks, does it again 3 more times shortly thereafter.

Parallels

Of course, the toy problem here is not a student, and what is modeled as the program’s “cognitive architecture” is nowhere near as complex as a student’s, even with regard to the same basic task of identifying 4 colors. There are obviously a lot of differences.

Yet there are a few parallels as well. For example, behaviorally, we see progress followed by regress with both the program and, in general, with students. Perhaps our minds work in a probabilistic way similar to that of the program. Could it be helpful to think about improvements to learning as strengthening response probabilities? Relatedly, “practice” observably strengthens what we would call “knowledge” in the program just as it does, again in general, for students.

And, I think fascinatingly, we can create and reverse “misconceptions” in both students and in this toy problem. We can see how this operates on just one color in the program by first training it to falsely identify blue as ‘green’ (to a level we benchmarked earlier as mastery—3 perfect responses in a row). Then, we can switch and begin teaching it the correct correspondence. As we can now predict, reversing the misconception will take longer than instantiating it, even with the optimal strategy, because the program’s register will have a large amount of information in it—we will be fighting against that large denominator.