It happened to me when I was in iitm for a week. Now, thats what i call a huge campus, which is as beautiful as it is massive. And my navigational skills suck ! ( This is one of the rare things i actually admit , I am bad at , so it can deciphered how bad I must be ).
So I wanted to take a walk to this place called Gurunath stores. I remembered someone had told me to go in the direction opposite to what I take when i go to Computer science block ( Or was it the sharavati hostel ? ) and walk until i see a small ICICI placard, and walk left from that. So I start walking left from Building Science block and kept walking for a long distance, waiting to spot that ICICI placard. It was a long time before i realised that the turns didnt seem familiar, hence i should ask someone for directions. A gentleman gave me a very warm ( sympathetic) smile and told me wait at a spot for the bus which would take me there. I bravely assured him that i wanted to walk and hence be kind enough to give the directions. So I walk beside the hockey-football grounds, electrical engineering dept, and take a right, when i suddenly spot that damn ICICI placard !
I "globally localized " and shifted the whole map in my mind according to my new position. And i did it as an impulse. That is when it struck me ! So this was what MK ( my robotics prof ) kept drawling on in the Mobile Robotics classes !
I have drawn analogies before, but it was never this striking. And the fact that i did it almost as an impulse, made me started thinking how someone would have bumped across the concept of "localization" and decided to use it for robotics !
After learning robotics for 2 years, "localization" is definitely a concept/term would take a permanent place in my dictionary/vocabulary.
With my perfect knowledge about the world, I proudly made my way back towards the sharavati hostel.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
The two pillars.
This post is an ode to those two people who literally shaped my professional career, sometimes knowingly and mostly unknowingly.
Yoda: I call him 'sir', but found an apt name after I watched star wars. He is probably the only person I have met till now, whose rationality actively strives to equal his brilliance. Inspite of being 50-something, He still has a well-nested child-like curosity in him, which makes him so approachable and an extremely interesting person to have around. He is a self-made genius, who didnt even start as a CompSci engineer, but today sustains single handedly various projects in my ex-workplace. On why and how did he shape my career, i woudl exactly quote a mail i wrote to him long time ago. -
"Now when i look back to those 2 years in eI, i can only think how lucky i was. When students enter industry, they witness petty politics and manipulation, but i got a chance to work with u and what i witnessed was sheer techincal excellence, humility and fairness, which helped me to be myself."
I regret I couldnt get to know him better, one because I felt shy, and second because he was a bigshot in the workplace and I felt a little hesistant in doing so, though I am sure he would have never minded.
A.G - This guy, fortunately was a close friend, and at a time, i was having serious exsistential crisis. A child prodigy, who has impressive academic records is also a self-made genius. There is nothing that this guy hasnt tried his hands on, electronics, mechanics, every damn field of computer science etc etc. In that way, AG and Yoda draw many parallels. They both are brilliant, humble, curious and fair, I used to always wonder what is that they are talking about in the office parking lot . There have been million times I felt like dropping by, craving to just listen to those intelligent exchanges, and maybe express an opinion or two. Well, there was no else i could talk about stuff like Computing and Intelligence, Science fiction, philosophy and metaphysics. But just knowing that they were there, who were interested in something more than APR's , QPR's and office politics was a consolation enough, that I would survive too. Inspite of all insanity around, these people stood as my pillars , mostly unknowingly, that there is still a lot of good and fairness in the world.
P.S : I wish i could write well, I feel i havent done justice to the ode.
Yoda: I call him 'sir', but found an apt name after I watched star wars. He is probably the only person I have met till now, whose rationality actively strives to equal his brilliance. Inspite of being 50-something, He still has a well-nested child-like curosity in him, which makes him so approachable and an extremely interesting person to have around. He is a self-made genius, who didnt even start as a CompSci engineer, but today sustains single handedly various projects in my ex-workplace. On why and how did he shape my career, i woudl exactly quote a mail i wrote to him long time ago. -
"Now when i look back to those 2 years in eI, i can only think how lucky i was. When students enter industry, they witness petty politics and manipulation, but i got a chance to work with u and what i witnessed was sheer techincal excellence, humility and fairness, which helped me to be myself."
I regret I couldnt get to know him better, one because I felt shy, and second because he was a bigshot in the workplace and I felt a little hesistant in doing so, though I am sure he would have never minded.
A.G - This guy, fortunately was a close friend, and at a time, i was having serious exsistential crisis. A child prodigy, who has impressive academic records is also a self-made genius. There is nothing that this guy hasnt tried his hands on, electronics, mechanics, every damn field of computer science etc etc. In that way, AG and Yoda draw many parallels. They both are brilliant, humble, curious and fair, I used to always wonder what is that they are talking about in the office parking lot . There have been million times I felt like dropping by, craving to just listen to those intelligent exchanges, and maybe express an opinion or two. Well, there was no else i could talk about stuff like Computing and Intelligence, Science fiction, philosophy and metaphysics. But just knowing that they were there, who were interested in something more than APR's , QPR's and office politics was a consolation enough, that I would survive too. Inspite of all insanity around, these people stood as my pillars , mostly unknowingly, that there is still a lot of good and fairness in the world.
P.S : I wish i could write well, I feel i havent done justice to the ode.
7 things that research taught me.
1) Happiness is rare, cherish it while you can.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.
2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.
3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.
4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.
5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.
6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.
7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.
P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.
2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.
3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.
4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.
5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.
6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.
7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.
P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
And then, it saved me
A day that started with a sense of accomplishment, became an exercise in humiliation as it drew to its end. I made futile attempts to distract myself by trying to think why a multi-threading framework doesn't work with C++ STL lists and debating with my friends on how using statistics is a not that bad a way to approach NLP, inspite its futility. Nothing really worked, I was still restless. So i decided to retire early. A good night's sleep can cure almost anything.
So i retire back to my room and suddenly I get this random urge to look through my CD pack. I find this DVD which i had burnt months ago, and i randomly decide to watch this movie called "The man from earth". I am so glad that i did.
The concept is not very alien. A man who never dies, has lived now for 14000 years, not sure of how people around him would react to it, moving from one place to another, as soon as someone starts noticing that he isnt aging etc etc. Whats interesting is how it is approached resulting in carving an almost flawless screenplay. Of course bolstered by excellent acting performances by the actors.
The whole film is no more than an intellectual discourse between the 14,000-year-old Cro-Magnon and his professor and teacher friends at his farewell party. There is a biologist, an anthropologist, a historian, an acrhaelogist, a psychologist and a christian literalist. The protagonist of the movie, John Oldman, starts a plethora of thought processes by expressing a hypothesis - "What if a man, from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?" , when his friends keep probing him for the reasons he has quit a job with a tenure and leaving almost clandestinely without even saying a goodbye to his friends he has known for 10 years. Listening to the hypothesis, the characters do, what academicians would do in such a situation--, ask questions. Basically all aspects of how a man who has seen 14000 years of mankind and society pass by would feel and think is covered with perfection. He talks about the things he had to unlearn, and then learn again, his intellectual capability which was a result of a rare opportunity he had, to understand whatever he had witnessed in the past with the help of the understanding of the present, how his views about religion slowly changed over that life span, how he faced problems getting in terms with his immortality on the personal fronts, everything expressed in succinct, yet profound replies. Also there is a touch of honesty around him, where he never gets too melodramatic about his immortality, never rants about how he wants to die as that is whats appropriate according to the laws of nature, he seems a little sad about he had to watch his loved ones age and perish, but all the extreme emotions seem to have settled into a cloak of stoicism., like the ripples in the water ultimately die out over a long period of time.
It also raises the question of how does one feel when the entire foundation of one's belief is shaken. If there is something that you believe blindly, and the next moment you see the evidence in front of your eyes that it was hogwash, does it feel like a free fall ? Does the human nature fights back with a sense of denial ? more than that, is it fair to shake someone's belief like that if its not doing any major harm to anyone else ? what is wisdom ? what is truth ?
All in all, it was a treat for the intellect. I liked a movie so much after a long time ! I was tempted to sms K and A 3a.m in the morning. Somehow decided against it. I finally slept off with a smile on my face.
So i retire back to my room and suddenly I get this random urge to look through my CD pack. I find this DVD which i had burnt months ago, and i randomly decide to watch this movie called "The man from earth". I am so glad that i did.
The concept is not very alien. A man who never dies, has lived now for 14000 years, not sure of how people around him would react to it, moving from one place to another, as soon as someone starts noticing that he isnt aging etc etc. Whats interesting is how it is approached resulting in carving an almost flawless screenplay. Of course bolstered by excellent acting performances by the actors.
The whole film is no more than an intellectual discourse between the 14,000-year-old Cro-Magnon and his professor and teacher friends at his farewell party. There is a biologist, an anthropologist, a historian, an acrhaelogist, a psychologist and a christian literalist. The protagonist of the movie, John Oldman, starts a plethora of thought processes by expressing a hypothesis - "What if a man, from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?" , when his friends keep probing him for the reasons he has quit a job with a tenure and leaving almost clandestinely without even saying a goodbye to his friends he has known for 10 years. Listening to the hypothesis, the characters do, what academicians would do in such a situation--, ask questions. Basically all aspects of how a man who has seen 14000 years of mankind and society pass by would feel and think is covered with perfection. He talks about the things he had to unlearn, and then learn again, his intellectual capability which was a result of a rare opportunity he had, to understand whatever he had witnessed in the past with the help of the understanding of the present, how his views about religion slowly changed over that life span, how he faced problems getting in terms with his immortality on the personal fronts, everything expressed in succinct, yet profound replies. Also there is a touch of honesty around him, where he never gets too melodramatic about his immortality, never rants about how he wants to die as that is whats appropriate according to the laws of nature, he seems a little sad about he had to watch his loved ones age and perish, but all the extreme emotions seem to have settled into a cloak of stoicism., like the ripples in the water ultimately die out over a long period of time.
It also raises the question of how does one feel when the entire foundation of one's belief is shaken. If there is something that you believe blindly, and the next moment you see the evidence in front of your eyes that it was hogwash, does it feel like a free fall ? Does the human nature fights back with a sense of denial ? more than that, is it fair to shake someone's belief like that if its not doing any major harm to anyone else ? what is wisdom ? what is truth ?
All in all, it was a treat for the intellect. I liked a movie so much after a long time ! I was tempted to sms K and A 3a.m in the morning. Somehow decided against it. I finally slept off with a smile on my face.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Spin the yarn
The following is result of a heated argument, a train journey and ample amount of leisure.
Mathematical truth, I think is the innate pattern embedded in whatever math we have discovered and would discover in future. What is required is to acknowledge the fact that, that math is so much more than just numbers, additions and calculus. There is a reason why we have primes just like there is a reason that there is a pattern found among them, or rather lack of it.
I have always found differential equations the most fascinating of all. If one notices, they are extremely powerful. They circumscribe a whole lot of things about a system in the most precise form.
Now, thats elegant. Morever, they are "complete", they describe the system for all boundary conditions and intermediate states between them. If ever, the equation for the universe is found, I am biased enough to believe that it would be in the form of a differential equation ( :D ).
I wonder, what would be the differential equation of emotions like love ? Or would they appear as just boundary conditions ? Temporary constructs of time-bounded variable ranges, stagnating a system to a certain state. If that is the case, there isnt much hope, you see ! One cannot be in love forever.
Maybe the differential equation is such that, towards the end of a life span, it just settles itself, from transient state to a stable state and the boundar conditions dont really matter in the end.
What if one wants to attain this state of "equilibrium" prematurely ? Is there an external way or more importantly is it worth it ? Maybe an equation's "purpose" is only fulfilled if it experiences all the bounday conditions. In that case, the extreme states that it experiences are justified. Is it possible to be ambivalent, while experiencing a powerful emotion ? Or maybe getting swepty away in it, is a part of the plan ?
That raises the question, that what is this darned "plan" anyways ? Is it conceitous to think that i play some part in the whole fabric of the universe ? Or am I an independent unit, which just experiences its sets of boundary conditions and then perishes ? But then if the tool that describes me is same as the tool that describes the universe, then a huge power is vested in each of us. Somehow, each of our differential equations somehow fit in infinitismely into the equation of the universe, maybe it justifies the phenomenon of butterfly effect.
Now with this insight, what is the purpose of each "differential equation" ? And why is that the knowledge of this purpose is not known to us ? Or is it ? present but not known. Thats tricky ! Its like a new math to describe the existing one.
There has to be a pattern in how we think and the things we devise to describe what/how we think. How many times have we felt that there is something huge, incomprehensible and somehow everything is related in some unknown way ? Is finding that relation our purpose ? But not everyone can learn or choose to learn advanced math, and its stupid to establish math as the only tool.
Considering only the group of lunatics who hold that mathematical truth as the only truth, one can hypothesize that purpose is to find the relation between my "equation" and the "equation" of the universe. But what if I dont want to actively pursue the so called "purpose" ? What if i deal in math, but dont neccessarily think that there is such relation or even if there is, dont neccessarily care what it is ? Does it make me "purposeless" ? Or is there a function estimator, that infinitismely defines the purpose, defining just a small step at a time, something like slowly zooming out and in the end viewing the complete picture. In way, there is a purpose hidden in even being "purposeless".
I am grade A lunatic.
Statuory Warning : Curosity and leisure are a dangerous combination.
Mathematical truth, I think is the innate pattern embedded in whatever math we have discovered and would discover in future. What is required is to acknowledge the fact that, that math is so much more than just numbers, additions and calculus. There is a reason why we have primes just like there is a reason that there is a pattern found among them, or rather lack of it.
I have always found differential equations the most fascinating of all. If one notices, they are extremely powerful. They circumscribe a whole lot of things about a system in the most precise form.
Now, thats elegant. Morever, they are "complete", they describe the system for all boundary conditions and intermediate states between them. If ever, the equation for the universe is found, I am biased enough to believe that it would be in the form of a differential equation ( :D ).
I wonder, what would be the differential equation of emotions like love ? Or would they appear as just boundary conditions ? Temporary constructs of time-bounded variable ranges, stagnating a system to a certain state. If that is the case, there isnt much hope, you see ! One cannot be in love forever.
Maybe the differential equation is such that, towards the end of a life span, it just settles itself, from transient state to a stable state and the boundar conditions dont really matter in the end.
What if one wants to attain this state of "equilibrium" prematurely ? Is there an external way or more importantly is it worth it ? Maybe an equation's "purpose" is only fulfilled if it experiences all the bounday conditions. In that case, the extreme states that it experiences are justified. Is it possible to be ambivalent, while experiencing a powerful emotion ? Or maybe getting swepty away in it, is a part of the plan ?
That raises the question, that what is this darned "plan" anyways ? Is it conceitous to think that i play some part in the whole fabric of the universe ? Or am I an independent unit, which just experiences its sets of boundary conditions and then perishes ? But then if the tool that describes me is same as the tool that describes the universe, then a huge power is vested in each of us. Somehow, each of our differential equations somehow fit in infinitismely into the equation of the universe, maybe it justifies the phenomenon of butterfly effect.
Now with this insight, what is the purpose of each "differential equation" ? And why is that the knowledge of this purpose is not known to us ? Or is it ? present but not known. Thats tricky ! Its like a new math to describe the existing one.
There has to be a pattern in how we think and the things we devise to describe what/how we think. How many times have we felt that there is something huge, incomprehensible and somehow everything is related in some unknown way ? Is finding that relation our purpose ? But not everyone can learn or choose to learn advanced math, and its stupid to establish math as the only tool.
Considering only the group of lunatics who hold that mathematical truth as the only truth, one can hypothesize that purpose is to find the relation between my "equation" and the "equation" of the universe. But what if I dont want to actively pursue the so called "purpose" ? What if i deal in math, but dont neccessarily think that there is such relation or even if there is, dont neccessarily care what it is ? Does it make me "purposeless" ? Or is there a function estimator, that infinitismely defines the purpose, defining just a small step at a time, something like slowly zooming out and in the end viewing the complete picture. In way, there is a purpose hidden in even being "purposeless".
I am grade A lunatic.
Statuory Warning : Curosity and leisure are a dangerous combination.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
RIP
My dog died last night. I never thought I would be the kind of person who would write about my pet dying, but here I am. My parents were crestfallen, they sat by her body the whole night and buried her on the banks of narmada in the morning.
She was a shriveled pup when she was brought to our house 7 years ago. My dad loved her from day one and so did my sister. My ma who has had experience with dogs before was of the opinion that it should be a master-pet relationship and discipline shouldn’t be compromised. When I was asked, I would list 100 different advantages of having a pet. That was it for me, a pet. Duties were assigned in the house about taking care of her ( I and my sister didn’t live in the city, we were both studying , so we weren’t given any, except the occasional helping around). Ma trained her really well, she never climbed beds, or other furnitures, had great sanitary habits ( read it as, never pissed or excreted in the house), even get her paws washed after coming back from the walk ( I still don’t know how Ma taught her that !! ). She defined roles of her own for us. Ma was the bread-giver, strict ,no-nonsense kind. I was a member of the family, who seemed no-nonsense and always kept a distance, Dad absolutely love her, she couldn’t live without him and my sister was this little kid in the house, who everybody loved and bossed around. I was most of the times a mute observer to how my family reacted to this dog and how it reacted back. Analysing and humouring myself that I was trying to learn some dog psychology or in turn human psychology.
Slowly and steadily I wasn’t too sure of myself anymore. I found myself getting attached to this canine inadvertently. One part of my brain said, it is just a pet, the other part could clearly see a personality in her. Whenever my dad dressed up and took out the car keys, she would jump around making a ruckus, clutching her belt in her mouth, as if pleading to take her in the car too. She loved occupying my mom’s seat in the car, that is right in the front, next to my dad. Whenever Ma used to “tell” her that my sister was about to return from the hostel, she would sit on the chair in the balcony, overlooking the road, as if waiting for her. And as soon as she spotted her on dad’s scooter or car, she would jump from her chair and rush down the stairs to greet her by jumping on her and licking her hand. She used to treat my sister as a kid, not really listening to her scoldings, daring to pinch away the food from her plate, but as soon as anyone of us tried scolding my sister, she used to bark out incessantly, as if protecting her. She used to get jealous if I and sister were spending a lot of time with my dad. She would keep her head in my dad’s lap or paw him to get his attention. She was the sole companion of my Ma, for months together when dad was out for work. Needless to say, Ma had softened a huge deal towards her. Overlooking her minor mistakes and sometimes even pampering her.
She seemed to have got some kind of uterus infection because she was losing a lot of blood and had stopped eating. During the last days, when the vet gave up all hopes, Ma used to try to feed her with a spoon, some milk or porridge. She had a peaceful expression on her face, when she died, Ma said.
I wish I was there. I don’t know how would have I reacted to see her dying in front of me. All I know is, it would be sad returning back home now, knowing that she wouldn’t be around to jump on me and lick my hand as soon as I enter those gates.
Rest In Peace.Saturday, September 20, 2008
Not all deceit is malevolent.
The comic strip can be found here.
Caption says - "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" :)
Friday, September 19, 2008
Power of conviction
An excerpt from Neil Gaiman's interview :
"and I feel like the gods smiled on me, and I got very lucky. Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."
There have been really few, rare times when I have felt truly satisfied with myself. And when i do i feel i take on the world.
Power of Conviction is indeed strong.
"and I feel like the gods smiled on me, and I got very lucky. Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."
There have been really few, rare times when I have felt truly satisfied with myself. And when i do i feel i take on the world.
Power of Conviction is indeed strong.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Irony
Why is that,
The more i know,
the less i want to speak.
why is that,
The deeper the bonds,
the lesser i seem to know.
why is that,
Sum is greater than its parts,
Is the story behind nearly everything.
The more i know,
the less i want to speak.
why is that,
The deeper the bonds,
the lesser i seem to know.
why is that,
Sum is greater than its parts,
Is the story behind nearly everything.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
An ode to sci-fi
With the frenzy of activity going on these days at CERN, whether the elusive "God's particle - Higgs Boson" would be found at the end of the collision of high energy proton beams in the world's longest/largest particle collider, whether the string theory would at last be vindicated against all those who claimed to be nothing more than Humbug, with hawkings betting 100$ on the fact that Bosons would continue to be elusive, i got into this weird mood after a long time.
Where i feel a certain peace in getting lost in myriad possibilities about life and evolution of the universe, we being a part of it. The more weirder the ideas are, the more peaceful i feel. Right now i feel like picking up something like Eater or Furious Gulf and reading them with a cup of hot coffee . To imagine how a magnetic field could evolve to become paradimensional intelligent being or to wander in an alternate space-time like an esty.
There are these rumours created around the experiment, like mini blackholes would be created in the accelerator, which would suck in everything and ultimately the world would end. I think they are pretty baseless, because the safety of the experiment has been substantiated by thousand of scientists. There are some extremely curious to the extent of being perilous, people like my friend K, who is actually hoping that something would go wrong. According to him, an experiment is more interesting when things go wrong.
Anyways, so this got reminded me of this brilliant short story written by Asimov called the "The last question". It was sent to me by my friend AG. Now, if I am skywalker, He is ObiWan of sci-fiction. We have a Yoda too ;) ( Right AG ? I dont know how SWK would look with pointy ears though :D).The flavour is similar to what Doughlas Adams 's Hitchiker's Guide to Galaxy about the "ultimate question" of life,universe and everything, but has a very skilful ending.
I recently watched the whole series of star-wars (all 6 in 2 days), on being loathed by my friend A, on calling myself a sci-fi fan, without having watch the The great Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi in action. She then asked me what did i think of it from the sci-fiction perspective. I found myself carefully contemplating for an answer. "Hard core science fiction for sure", I said. On why i didnt like it that much, I concluded that i got used to the benefords and baxters too soon. For that matter, I am guilty of not being able to enjoy even "The time machine" by H.G wells. Which brought up a question, how does one grade a good science fiction ?
Firstly, the novelty of the ideas, which are supported by enough science, again it shouldnt be just any theory out of thin air, they should mainly be an extrapolation of science we already know today, the more unexplored realm it is, the better. (Like a living magnetic field or BiCentinnial Man, Btw I think Asimov is the best person who has explored the thin line between artificial intelligence and cognition) .
Second the normal consistency of the story against the backdrop of science.
And third, the ending. Sometimes its a message, ( like the humorous one in THGTG, God's last message to the humans ? - "Sorry for the inconvenience" -- I laughed out loud for some 10 minutes at that one ), sometimes a shock ( "The last question" , it just "fits" ).
*Sigh*, I need a hard core science fiction novel right now !
Got this brilliant link:
Where i feel a certain peace in getting lost in myriad possibilities about life and evolution of the universe, we being a part of it. The more weirder the ideas are, the more peaceful i feel. Right now i feel like picking up something like Eater or Furious Gulf and reading them with a cup of hot coffee . To imagine how a magnetic field could evolve to become paradimensional intelligent being or to wander in an alternate space-time like an esty.
There are these rumours created around the experiment, like mini blackholes would be created in the accelerator, which would suck in everything and ultimately the world would end. I think they are pretty baseless, because the safety of the experiment has been substantiated by thousand of scientists. There are some extremely curious to the extent of being perilous, people like my friend K, who is actually hoping that something would go wrong. According to him, an experiment is more interesting when things go wrong.
Anyways, so this got reminded me of this brilliant short story written by Asimov called the "The last question". It was sent to me by my friend AG. Now, if I am skywalker, He is ObiWan of sci-fiction. We have a Yoda too ;) ( Right AG ? I dont know how SWK would look with pointy ears though :D).The flavour is similar to what Doughlas Adams 's Hitchiker's Guide to Galaxy about the "ultimate question" of life,universe and everything, but has a very skilful ending.
I recently watched the whole series of star-wars (all 6 in 2 days), on being loathed by my friend A, on calling myself a sci-fi fan, without having watch the The great Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi in action. She then asked me what did i think of it from the sci-fiction perspective. I found myself carefully contemplating for an answer. "Hard core science fiction for sure", I said. On why i didnt like it that much, I concluded that i got used to the benefords and baxters too soon. For that matter, I am guilty of not being able to enjoy even "The time machine" by H.G wells. Which brought up a question, how does one grade a good science fiction ?
Firstly, the novelty of the ideas, which are supported by enough science, again it shouldnt be just any theory out of thin air, they should mainly be an extrapolation of science we already know today, the more unexplored realm it is, the better. (Like a living magnetic field or BiCentinnial Man, Btw I think Asimov is the best person who has explored the thin line between artificial intelligence and cognition) .
Second the normal consistency of the story against the backdrop of science.
And third, the ending. Sometimes its a message, ( like the humorous one in THGTG, God's last message to the humans ? - "Sorry for the inconvenience" -- I laughed out loud for some 10 minutes at that one ), sometimes a shock ( "The last question" , it just "fits" ).
*Sigh*, I need a hard core science fiction novel right now !
Got this brilliant link:
Monday, February 18, 2008
Frankenstein
For all those I would ever care to show this one, already know what triggered it.
I was thoroughly bored on a Sunday afternoon, so I was going through some of the older and the most interesting chats I have ever had with people, I came across this one with a friend of mine, who I consider has quite an intelligent imagination and an appetite for abstractness.
So he got metaphysical and asked me what did I think was “thought”? And I answered – A thought can be described as a function in the neural/neuronal space. ( I love being a theoretician :D).
The thought stuck in my mind the whole day that resulted in the following hypothesis.
Firstly why a thought should be a function in the neural/neuronal space. Since when you “think” about something, its not merely a “thought”, it is a combination of certain visual, audio (namely all sensory) memories of a certain event and your reactions to them, which can be quantified as certain sets of neurons firing at the same time or in succession to each other over some short period of time. So imagine if every neuron represent one dimension, for ‘n’ neurons involved for a certain kind of thought, a thought can be described as a trajectory in n-dimensional neuronal space.
There can always be a function approximation for any given trajectory, using machine learning methods like neural networks. (Are we approaching an infinite loop here ?)
Anyways, since the dimensions we would be dealing here would be huge, we can first use dimension reduction techniques like PCA (Principal Component Analysis ), and extract the most relevant features ( in simple words, the neurons that really matter and contribute to the “thought”). The trajectory can be approximated by two methods.
One, you can use a neural network, where you don’t actually get the function describing the trajectory, but get a model, which would predict the output, given an input i.e you can find out what kind of “thought” would one have if an another set of neurons are triggered. But for some reason, the idea doesn’t seem very alluring to me, one reason might be that sometime in the past, attempts were made to model the brain using neural network, hence it would be like using method ‘A’ to model ‘A’. ( That was what I meant when I said infinite loop ), the rhetorical skepticism that we would as human beings would never able to understand a human brain, because it would be limited by the fact that a brain is trying to understand itself and would result in never ending loop of reasoning and how something greater than human brain is required to do the job.
Second, one can use something called Kernel Methods widely used in Machine Learning these days. What you try and do is find a feature space where the trajectory is a hyperplane ( like a straight line in 2-dimension, plane in 3 dimension etc ). The mapping is done by something called a kernel function. One can have polynomial, guassian, hyperbolic tan as kernel functions. Hence the mapping can also be done to the feature space with infinite dimensions ( for example in guassian kernel , u use the exponent ‘e’ function which is an infinite expansion of polynomials ).
Again it is easier said than done. The main problem is how do you choose the kernel function ? How do you know in what feature space would the trajectory be a hyperplane? Unfortunately there is no correct answer for it. But there are techniques like kernel boosting, where one starts with a set of what are called ‘weak kernels’, and try to find the accurate kernel as a linear combination of these kernels.
On an optimistic note, you would have an approximate function describing a particular kind of thought ( isn’t that a treat for mathematicians and cognitive scientists ?? )
This might be just a beginning. Once the functions for all “thoughts” are known, they can be combined in “some” way to define a personality or the person himself.
Imagine an equation describing yourself, whatever you u could ever think, talk or do.
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