v1ta111 / chapters

The online textbook Probabilistic Models of Cognition

About

Source code for the online book, Probabilistic Models of Cognition.

Source files

Chapters are written in Pandoc-extended Markdown and should have a .md extension. There are three kinds of chapter files:

• Index. An introduction to the book and a list of all public chapters. Lives in index.md.

• Public. The main content of the book. The order of chapters is declared inside chapters.txt in the following format:

  generative-models
  conditioning
  patterns-of-inference
  

  (i.e., one filename per line, omit the .md portion)

• Private. Used for the play space (play-space.md) and any other pages that needn't be in the main content of the book.

I highly recommend reading through the Pandoc Markdown documentation before editing the chapter files. generative-models.md offers a good example of the syntax. One convention is worth mentioning. We use the "fenced" code-block syntax, e.g.,

~~~~ {data-engine="bher" data-exercise="simple-flip"}
(flip (0.5))
~~~~

Within the curly braces, data-engine="bher" specifies that this code block will be run through the bher inference engine (the current choices are webchurch, bher, mit-church, and cosh). This engine property will be injected as a CSS class in the compiled HTML. The data-exercise property indicates the name of the exercise; this is used to organize records in the database of student-run programs. data-exercise is an optional property (in this case, the database won't store runs for this exercise), but if it is declared, it must be unique within the chapter file.

The look and feel of the book is controlled by three files: chapter.template, index.template, and style.css.

Compiling

Use the command:

make all

If you want to compile just some subset of files, you can do:

make generative-models.html conditioning.html mixture-models.html

Some other commands:

• make clean: Remove all compiled and intermediate files.
• make rebuild: Do make clean and then make all.
• make public: Compile only the public chapters.
• make private: Compile only the private chapters.

Read the Makefile for details

Dependencies

• Bash
• Pandoc 1.11.1+
• Python 2.7+
• GNU make
• GNU sed (if you're on OS X, you likely don't have this; try port install gsed)
• Browserify

Development Notes

TODO

• Add some directory structure to separate input (Markdown + assets [e.g., images]) from output.

build times (seconds)

single threaded: 10.8, 10.7 -j: 6.8, 6.9