Can YouTube Really Read Your Mind?
Can YouTube Really Read Your Mind? — If the feeling of "similar" can be turned into numbers and distances, then even a computer can handle "taste." Coordinates aren't just for school tests — they're hiding behind the recommendations you see every day.
YouTube is uncanny. Watch one soccer video and a stream of soccer videos appears next. Your friend, on the same YouTube, gets something totally different. Is YouTube really reading your mind — or is there a secret?
Before computers, people grouped similar things by hand. A librarian sorted books by topic; a shopkeeper learned by memory that "people who bought this also liked that." But with billions of videos, no human brain can sort them. Mathematicians took on the question: can we express "similarity" as a number?
The brilliant idea was this: give every video coordinates! Just like the (x, y) coordinates from school, each video gets a list of numbers — [sports score, music score, gaming score…]. A soccer video scores high on sports; a ballet video scores high on art. Now every video is a "point" on a giant map. Find the points near the videos you watched, and those are your recommendations. In math, such a "point with direction and distance" is called a vector. YouTube isn't reading your mind — it's measuring the distance between points.
- YouTube, Netflix, TikTok recommendations: videos turned into vectors, nearest ones suggested
- Shopping sites: "people who viewed this also viewed"
- Music apps (Spotify): songs turned into vectors to suggest similar tracks
- AI like ChatGPT: understands words and sentences all as vectors
類 (ryu) means "a group of similar things gathered together." The I Ching says "方以類聚 — like gathers with like." YouTube gathering similar videos by vector is exactly the math of 類.
Meet this hanja in Cheonjamun →If the feeling of "similar" can be turned into numbers and distances, then even a computer can handle "taste." Coordinates aren't just for school tests — they're hiding behind the recommendations you see every day.
