Cortically Magnified

A recent paper published in PNAS titled “The Fermi-Dirac distribution provides a calibrated probabilistic output for binary classifiers” caught my attention, because it describes a surprising relationship between machine learning and quantum physics. In fact, surprising is an understatement. Mind-boggling is more like it. According to the analogy developed by the authors, positive samples in binary classification problems are like… fermions?! What?! I decided that I should try to understand the gist of this paper, at least to the extent that I can.