My Tryst with Statistics and AI
An AI generated image With all the buzz around AI these days, I figured it was time to jot down my thoughts on the journey—from hating statistics to embracing AI. The Early 1980s: Hating the "Magic" Back in my engineering college days, I despised statistics. It felt like some magician's trick: "There are 5 black and 8 white balls in a bag. Pick one at random—what's the chance it's white?" Pulling rabbits, pigeons, or balls from bags? No thanks. I deliberately dodged it. Mid-1980s: Thrown into the Deep End Then I joined MICO (now Bosch) as a trainee engineer and rose to become an Inspection Foreman. Suddenly, I was swimming in that "magic" sea. No desktops yet those day—just mainframes like Data General or IBM (too big for our small tasks) or we crunched data manually: plotted histograms, frequency charts, used log-normal plots to calculate averages (X Bar) and standard deviations (s or sigma). Probability helped predict defects and decide whe...