Definition
Plain language
A program that sorts things into categories, like 'spam or not spam'.
As stated in the literature
A model that maps inputs to discrete class labels; in this corpus, small classifiers are repurposed as cheap judges for leakage detection, suspicion scoring, and proposal filtering.
Also called: classifiers
Why it matters: It turns messy inputs into clean category labels, making it a cheap, fast tool for tasks like flagging suspicious or sensitive content.
For example, an email program uses a classifier to decide whether each incoming message goes to the inbox or the spam folder.
Heard on the show
“The system feeds pairs of tokens into the optical setup, reads out the Complex-B field, trains a simple linear classifier on top, and the classifier solves XOR.”Episode 002 — An AI Ran a Real Optics Lab for 21 Hours and Found a Transformer-Shaped Pattern in Light