The Palaeontologist’s muse

There are two types of forces in the world. There are the explosive, fast forces like volcanoes, earthquakes and thermonuclear fusion weapons. And then there are the slow ones – the rivers that cleave mountains and the seas which batter entire land-masses into submission. In our brief, fleeting, lives we tend to recognise the fast shapers as superior in some way. But take a look at the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas – they were shaped over thousands of years (by water erosion and tectonic plates moving against each other respectively) by the slow powers that be.

The process of science parallels this aspect of nature. There are the moments of extreme insight – the ‘eureka’ moments where we make giant strides in fleeting instants. And then there is the slow process of chipping away at the barriers nature places between us and knowledge. Where we batter down the obstacles we face and achieve our ends inches at a time. This post is dedicated to that inexorable movement. For though the sprint may get us over a hill, it is the march that moves armies over continents.

I mentioned in ‘Our little friends to be’ that I’d spent the winter (of 08-09) in the US. I stayed in Washington DC for the entirety of that trip (except for two awesome days in New York). And as any geek worthy of that title would have done, I spent more than a few days running around the Smithsonian(s) grinning in delight. They weren’t as great as I thought they would be. Don’t get me wrong, they were brilliant. But they seemed to fall a way short of expectation – the dinosaurs didn’t seem as big and the sabre-toothed cats not as menacing as I thought they would in my imagination. But a few parts stood out. One of them, in the palaeontology section is what’s inspiring this post:

They had this glass room in which the palaeontologists who prepared the fossils worked. You could watch them work like any other exhibit at the museum. The room was brightly lit and the hallway outside quite dark. So, I guess, to someone inside it would seem like the quiet labs they were used to. People knocking on the glass, however, might’ve be a problem. But the hilarious sign I’ve photographed above seemed to stop most of that!

A palaeontologist digs up fossils. Fossils can be pretty large – the fully preserved hip of a brachiosaur for example. But I’m given to believe that most are small – teeth, bone fragments and the like. In any case, Palaeontologists dig them up and clean them with instruments like toothbrushes (only for heavy duty work!), paint brushes and other stuff like that. Imagine the patience it takes to sit in the mid-day heat of a desert and dig out a five tonne piece of mineralised bone embedded 20 meters up a cliff-face with a fine sable! What madness drives them!?! But scientists and engineers do that all the time. We seldom rely on leaps of intuition.

There are hundreds of famous examples of this in the history of science. Men and Women have so often made thousands of models and millions of calculations before they got things right. I myself have spent weeks varying values in a circuit trying to find an optimal configuration.

But the effort is almost always worth it. Look around you. Look at that plane overhead or the cell phone you hold in your hand. They almost surely took a massive effort to design and build. But ask an engineer who creates them or a scientist who discovers the principles they rely on and they’ll tell you that the sheer joy of seeing their work come alive is worth every drop of sweat and ever hour lost in thought.

I know this joy. And I suspect almost every creator of things does too. It is our reason. It is the thing that binds us to our lab-benches and drives us. It is our muse. The muse that inspires the palaeontologist within us all to chip away at his problem one layer of dirt at a time.

The nature of will. On the forces that drive.

I once wrote a post titled: ‘To live or not to live. That isn’t really a question’ for my old blog: http://oftheforge.blogspot.com. I dealt with the idea of the human desire to exist, live and fight for his or her life when all evidence points to the magnificent insignificantness of our existence. I came to the conclusion that we live simply because we want to live. And that those bloodlines who didn’t would quickly be weeded out by natural selection. Here I’m going to try and talk about the (related) idea of ‘will’.

The next few paragraphs will be dreary and serious. Bear with me. They are important.

As an added note: these are my ideas alone. I haven't taken the trouble to read through more than Wikipedia or talk to someone who’s devoted any amount of time and study to this. Well, here we go:

A person who chooses not to steal because the Ten Commandments said so would be exercising free will because it was their choice to follow the Ten Commandments Someone who independently forms their own moral system or who composes a musical composition pleasing to themselves. however, would be exercising an act of will. –Wikipedia, on Nietzsche’s perspective

Nietzsche clearly felt that will was something that made us act in a certain way. That something was his higher ‘an act of will’ when it was somehow internally motivated. I disagree. I believe that his perspective is an abstraction of my more general principle:

Will is the ability/practice to put/of putting a larger long term gain* ahead of a smaller short term gain*.

-*Gain is some tangible, visible or perceived benefit whether internal or external. It should be applied in the broadest sense possible, applying to both the trivial and the grand. Also, it is important that the idea of ‘larger’ and ‘longer term’ be applied very liberally. A situation where someone does B instead of A or C, where A is the most immediate and easiest option, B is the middle choice and C the ultimate ‘best choice’ is still exercising ‘will’ as defined above. In this case C is simply disregarded and B is taken as the more ‘difficult’ yet ‘better’ ‘longer term’ ‘gain’ according to that person’s inner reasoning when compared to A. – Me.

Starting with that first principle, we can derive Nietzsche as follows: In the 10 commandments case the smaller, short term gain was the wealth the theft would bring him. The longer term gains (of not doing so) are several – the internal tangible benefit of not having to deal with his conscience, the visible benefit of not being caught and punished and the perceived benefit of being admitted to heaven having lived a virtuous life. The second case is more interesting. For this we must analyse the concept of ‘pleasing to themselves’. I believe that the idea of satisfying oneself can be looked upon as a combination of a  sense of achievement, as simple pleasure and as a stepping stone to something bigger (such as acquiring a mate or future success). All these are, I believe, things our minds trick ourselves into doing as they increase the probability that our Genes will survive. In this sense, my definition holds as the composer is giving up the small gain of lazing around and having fun for the perceived greater, longer term goal of becoming a more eligible mate and more successful person in all. Do note that it is not required for this process to be carried out entirely consciously. Our minds trick us with abstractions. Thus, we simply note that an extra helping of Kesari (a sweet from south India, which you’ll love!) is ‘bad’ rather than trace its effects on our health and thus our eligibility as mates and our efficiency at doing other, advantageous things before denying ourselves it.

One important thing to note is exactly what I have intended to do with my definition of will. I wanted a definition that would apply to all scenarios, especially, situations where a person could be called ‘strong willed’ for doing something instead of some other thing. In the second case I have not actually reconciled Nietzsche's idea of free will with mine. I have simply explained how my definition satisfies an act of free will (i.e. the motivation to do something like that) but not the specifications of that free will itself. I am separating the concept of free-will, the idea of choice and non-determinism, from ‘will’, the somewhat abstract idea of force and power we associate with the word ‘will’.

Volition or will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving. – Wikipedia on ‘Volition’

Again, this straddles the line between my ‘will’ and the idea of free will. I have tried to define the kind of will it takes to drive a human against all perceived odds. The kind of will you find possessed by heroes ancient (Hector et all etc) and in modern graphic literature (Batman, say) as almost a power that is as important as super-strength or speed. ‘purposive striving’ is closer to what I’m getting at; obviously, it derives from my definition too – why would you sacrifice your immediate comfort to ‘strive’ unless some greater reward lay at the end?

At this point, having discussed several approaches to ‘the will that motivates’, I have hopefully convinced you that my definition of ‘will’ is a good basis for understanding that aspect of the human psyche. Before I get to the point of this post I’d like to address another point: My definition can act repetitively (recursively if you will… no pun intended). For example: in the example given as an addendum to my definition a person chose B out of A, B, C where they lie in increasing order of ‘gain’ and ‘long term-ness’. Here my definition is ideally applied twice. In the first B was chosen disregarding C. Here the person is ‘weak-willed’ as, in the act of deciding on the ultimate objective the ‘best’ one was given up for something easier. He, however, is still ‘strong-willed’ in pursuing B instead of the immediate comfort that A would provide. I am not specifying any limits to these ideas. A person who gets out of the way of a speeding car is still accounted for because he/she took the effort of moving (effort toward the longer term gain of staying alive) as opposed to the ‘easy’ option of simply staying put. This application might seem weird at first, but I feel that a certain amount of ‘will’ is built into our instincts. Doing something to avoid almost immediate pain and suffering instead of just sitting there and enjoying the even more immediate lack of exertion still counts!

And now to the point of it all- isn’t the idea of ‘will’ beautiful? It is so abstract, so belonging to the realm of grander things. But it is something we experience, within ourselves, every day of our lives. I am exercising my will when I write this. I could have simply slept or played another game of Quake. But I didn’t. Why? Well, I don’t really know. All I get from my head is that I’m doing something ‘good’. What my head thinks It’ll result in is beyond the ‘conscious me’. Doesn’t that intrigue you?

I simply want to peer into that great, dark mystery that is the human mind. And I don’t think that it is very complex in its basis at all. I believe that it is just a few rules (like this one) applied over and over again, in inconceivably complex ways. Each of those rules are simple products of natural selection (Indeed, the idea of ‘will’, especially as I have defined it, is an obvious aid to our survival) yet they have resulted in something so much more impressive than anything else around us. We build ships to the planets and cities that tower above all. Our nearest ancestors, who are supposedly, 98% like us would be lucky to build a misshapen club. How on earth is that possible? I refuse to subscribe to any of the silly ideas (read: supernatural explanations) that many rely to- they answer nothing. I yearn to answer that question; to understand ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. Because hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to improve upon it.

Meet thy maker

“Prepare to meet thy maker!”. You must have heard that phrase somewhere (Or at least its less cool, non Dog-Latin equivalent: Prepare to meet your maker). Most likely in one of those terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movies we all bitch about in respectable company but watch in secrecy (and, need it be said, extreme boredom). Well, in any case, what does it really mean? How the hell [pun not intended……. at first :) ] do you prepare for something as weird as that? No, that’s just silly! And I am not going to waste anyone’s time by filling out the rest of this post with step by step advice on doing the same. i.e. nothing like- ‘#42: In front of Him, another layer of deo just won’t cut it. Better break out the soap’. No, this is about small disasters. The things that make you fell you have to prepare to meet your maker. In particular, two that struck me like a large plate of expensive noodles. With meatballs.*

Now, what is a small disaster? ‘Small disaster’! Its almost an oxymoron! Well, a small disaster is something that really, really sucks. It won’t, by definition, matter at all in the long run and it usually doesn’t affect the world at large, just a few people, maybe you and a few friends, who think similar. A small disaster is your favourite book store closing down, Its finding out that the flavour of ice cream you love will no longer be made or that the bookmark you’ve used for twenty seven years will be kitty litter in a few hours. Its the thing that makes you feel that the world’s ending now. When in reality, all you really need to do is look in the mirror (and if your head works anything like mine, laugh your guts out at the sorry figure you see), take a deep breadth and get on with the business of living.

So what happened to me? What could’ve possibly made me write this post? Well, first, you need a lil background. See, I’m what you call a geek (Gee, what was your first clue?). I live by the stylus on my PDA and on the mind-numbing uberness of the interweb. I am also a rather ordered geek (read the post titled ‘The hammer of order’ for more on that). I like my email, tasks, contacts, etc etc to stay in sync. I also need my mobile internet access (I’m the kind of guy who thinks Google-stalking you is easier than just asking you what you do. And did I mention more fun – chances are, someone’s uploaded that old Vegas vid on YouTube!). And I had it all! Airtel’s dirt cheap ‘Mobile Office’ data plan was perfect for me- 75 Rupees a week and I had unlimited net access wherever I went! And then there was the free hosted exchange by the nice people at mail2web. That allowed me to keep everything in sync, let me access anything I wanted from anywhere and was really, really easy to use on my WinMO PDA.

Then they died. The exchange service was the first to go. The mail2web people wanted to upgrade their software to match Microsoft's latest version (Which, according to Bill’s marketing department was just a little bit better than FSM* heaven) and ended up running balls-first into a wall of licence agreements. The result? They couldn’t let the service be free even if they wanted to! (And you thought Gates had idiots working for him before huh?). So they pulled the plug on that nice slice of heaven and decided to charge for the stuff that I’d been enjoying for all of zero. Dealing with that blow wasn’t actually that bad, not compared to what’s happened now, but I digress – my exchange died and all was smote in its ruin. (According to Tolkien that means “things were f**ked up cause it went bust”). So, I dealt with it. I shifted back to the windows live ‘push’ service Microsoft offers for free (and which is nowhere near as good as exchange) and came up with an ad-hock way of backing up and accessing my stuff online: Microsoft’s ‘My Phone’. It took patience, some surgery and a little fiddling around but it seems to work for the large part.

And then Airtel went and decided that a freakin’ duck would make good VP of marketing material (I think they thought a quack would lend them more credibility with the Godman demographic). They went and discontinued the entire mobile office scheme. And replaced it with a charge of 30p for every 50kb transferred. Read those lines and weep ye! 30p for every 50kb! That's bad by the standards they had in biblical times (Imagine John trying to publish to ‘http://bible.blogspot.com’** and running into repeated 404s)!

I’m dealing with that disaster as we speak. I have opera mini set up as my default browser (all tricked out to reduce usage). My email is configured to arrive only at certain hours of the day and It doesn’t download anything but the text. I also have a connection monitor in place that warns me if I use too much. But its hard, I’m dealing with it one day at a time. Wish me luck. Or better yet, wish Airtel luck. I’m going to go after them with stuff covered in cool yellow-and-black hazard signs.

peace….. Unless you work for Airtel

*FSM, noodles, Meatballs etc. I hope you know I’m referring to the church of the flying spaghetti monster.

**I think there is actually a blog by that title. I haven’t seen it and have nothing to do with it.

PS: bout all the weird religion references…. well, I had to tie the post to the title (liked it, didn’t want to change it) somehow right?

Our little friends to be

During a recent visit to the US, while roaming around a mall I happened upon a stall of Roombas. A Roomba is a vacuum cleaning robot. It has enough intelligence (and the required sensors, actuators etc etc) to navigate around a room avoiding obstacles like chairs, cables, stairs and cats and use a built in vacuum cleaner to clean the carpets. Once done it makes its way back to the base station and charges itself. It does all this without the any human interference. They cost a couple hundred dollars, that's less than most mid range phones, though I doubt anybody actually uses one as their primary mode of carpet cleaning. I’ve read that they aren’t really all that good at it – they don't work well for multiple rooms, they tend to miss corners and they get stuck from time to time.

Obviously, a Roomba isn’t what we thought we’d have by 2009 way back in the 1960s (say). Back then we thought we’d have intelligent humanoids who could do almost all that we take for granted in humans. And we kinda assumed we’d be far enough along for interesting evening gossip to consist of tales of Mrs Parker’s ‘special’ relationship with her new mark IV (again, say). But then again, we also assumed we’d have rocket ships to Jupiter, ray guns and flying cars. Sadly, as a prudish Victorian would remark at all that (especially Mrs Parker): Alas! Taws' not to be!

So what happened? Where exactly did all those wonderful dreams fall out? Have we just not worked hard enough? Is the KGB responsible for it all? Or did we just hope for a little too much in our naiveté? I’d wager on the last one.

See, building a robot that works in the real world is just not easy. There are too many little things that keep popping up that are so difficult to solve (especially with the constraints current, available, hardware places on us). For example there is the problem of navigation. A four year old can walk from one end of a room to another without bumping into too many things. So can a rat. A million dollar bot though, might still have problems. Especially if you throw a shoe in its way once its off. Now why is that the case? I think its because of the way we’ve approached robotics so far.

When you’re asked to create a robot that can solve a problem we tend to approach it too mathematically. We give it data (or it collects data) and we then try to calculate the best probable path (to take the example of path finding) using that data. But what is the best path? Given a top down look of a room, a sort of God’s eye, view I’m sure there is one. But you never get that sort of view. What you have to work with is a rat’s eye view. From that perspective the only way forward it to make ‘educated guesses’. For example: ‘That's a shoe in front of me. Shoes are small and light. I can move it out of the way or try to go around it.’. As opposed to: ‘Sensor #4 reports obstacle. can’t…move… 01010101. B.S.O.D’. This  first example illustrates how we tend to work. And that's how a robot will need to work in order to get around.

This is where all those interesting terms that scientists love to sprinkle on their papers come it – neural networks, genetic algorithms and the rest. But exactly what are these? Essentially, they are models of how things in nature work – neural networks model brains and genetic algorithms model evolution. They abstract things and give you a solution (all proven mathematically) but don’t tell you exactly how they got there. For example, a neural network might help a robot recognise a shoe even if its placed at an odd angle, is upside down and is actually one of those silly things from Prada  (as opposed to the sneaker it was originally shown and trained to recognise as ‘shoe’) They offer some hope because they work well when brute computation won’t. But they don’t bode well with me.

Why don’t they? Because of their nature – they are black boxes. They give you a solution, but not the same one every time and not always the best one. And that just won’t do. I want my robots to work the same every time; to be quick, efficient and straightforward while still having that ‘intuitive fuzziness’ we ascribe to living things (and which the aforementioned ‘natural algorithms’ may give us). Why? Because that’s what robots are for damnit! To do all the stupid little things that suck up our time and free ourselves from the drudgery we would otherwise otherwise have go through ourselves. Like the laundry,  making that perfect cup of coffee and cleaning out the kitty litter. We do those things well-ish because our brains consist of one huge neural network which can handle things in the real world, unlike a hard coded system. But we don’t do it perfectly for the same reason – neural networks are fuzzy. We can guess that we’ve added just about enough sugar but don’t know for sure. A robot ought to be able to measure that to the microgram.

So what’s the solution? I think it’ll involve some sort of hybrid. A robot that will have a traditional hard coded ‘core’ that can call* on ‘softer’ biologically inspired modules to do specific things (For example: call* an ‘object recogniser’ to figure out exactly what it is that's blocking its path or call* a ‘path finder’ iteratively to figure out how to get to the socket on the wall while not waking the annoying kitty). But that’s just me thinking aloud now. If you want to know for sure just get back to me in a few years. I’ll have it down pat by then :)

Where does that leave us then? Hopefully, in a few years (or decades if you’re pessimistic) we’ll have a model III to weed the lawn, a type 7 to make us meals and a mark IV to... err… well, ask Mrs Parker. And then we’ll finally have enough time and freedom to look at the big picture and contemplate whatever it is we want to. We’ll be free to dream and build and do all that we never could if we had to go through the chore of keeping ourselves alive and ticking.

I for one can’t wait for the day I’ll get to say hello to the plethora of our little friends to be.