30 MAY 2026

Day 150

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Walter Pater · The Renaissance

A tall, narrow clay prism densely covered on its faces with tightly packed lines of cuneiform inscription, the surface a muted brown-grey.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Taylor and Sennacherib Prisms

Neo-Assyrian Empire · 690 BC · Clay

Three clay prisms carry the same royal text from 690 BC. One, now in the British Museum, was among the earliest cuneiform objects studied and still frames a famous siege.

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II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Gradient-Based Meta-Learning (MAML)

optimization · gradient-based meta-learning · Finn et al. 2017; Nichol et al. 2018

Rather than training a model to solve one problem well, MAML searches for starting weights from which a few gradient steps on scarce new data can reach strong performance on many tasks.

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A tall canvas of a pale stone church with a dark roof under a deep blue sky. A path in the green foreground splits in two; a small figure walks on the grass near the building.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

The Church at Auvers

Vincent van Gogh · June 1890 · Oil on canvas

In June 1890 Van Gogh painted the church at Auvers-sur-Oise in oil on canvas. The picture now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, ninety-four centimetres high.

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