It's Rishi

Last week I was channel surfing while eating dinner in front of the TV. After failing to find anything interesting, I gave up and settled on Jeopardy. I used to watch Jeopardy sometimes as a kid and I recall being amazed at how smart the better contestants were. Not only did they have vast amounts of knowledge, but more importantly could recall it in just one or two seconds. While watching the show last week, I found myself equally amazed as before. One particular contestant fired off answers to 15th century European history questions (or more correctly “questions for answers”) so quickly I thought he must have just finished authoring a book on the subject.

By the time the Final Jeopardy round came, I was done with dinner and in front of my laptop. The question (err answer, whatever..) was given and (of course) I had not the faintest clue. For the heck of it, I typed some relevant keywords into Google and bingo! I solved Final Jeopardy. It turned out that two of the three contestants solved it correctly also. Sure, they couldn’t use Google to find the answer, but at the end of the day, in the real world, I would be equally as effective as these two contestants. This realization sparked me to think about the value of knowledge.

What’s the purpose of knowledge? My answer would be that knowledge allows one to perform a task more efficiently. Any task. The task could be conquering the latest shoot-em-up video game, cooking dinner, or solving a complex mathematics proof. Each of these tasks can be performed faster if the individual performing that task has relevant knowledge in the respective domain. The problem though is that for knowledge to be useful, it’s not sufficient that you had once gained that knowledge. Instead, for it to be useful, you not only need to have once gained it, you also must be able to recall it both accurately and in a timely manner. Without speed and accuracy in recollection, having knowledge is useless.

How useless? The test is this: Your brain or an electronic/digital means, which is faster? Which will give me the info I need faster, more accurately, and more consistently? Nine times out of ten, my answer to this question is the latter. Honestly, I wonder why I even bother remembering anything. Phone numbers? Got my cell. Favorite restaurants? Got Yelp. CS stuff? Google works just fine. Forgot who my friends are? Got my AIM buddy list, MySpace and Facebook. How to get home from work? Got a navigation system. How to spell my name? Outlook auto-corrects it. Ok, I think you get my point…

The thing you need to remember is that all the electronic information sources I just mentioned came very recently. You think finding this information is easy now? Trust me, it’ll get easier. I’m just waiting for Google to announce a search plugin for your brain. Sounds ridiculous but is it really that crazy to imagine such a device might be available in my lifetime?

Now, you might argue that humans are capable creatures because of our intelligence, not simply our knowledge. Intelligence implies not just semantic knowledge but the ability to combine building-blocks of knowledge into composite forms of knowledge and, ultimately, to innovate. Innovation, after all, is a hallmark of human civilization. Innovation implies a certain higher level of thought which only a human can perform. You could say that freeing our minds of the burden of knowledge management will allow our mind to focus on innovation and other forms of higher-level thought.

But this implies that computers cannot perform high-level thought. Computers can be given “intelligence”. It is very common today to program computers to make sophisticated decisions based on input data. Due to complexity, or other limitations, many of such decisions were once thought impossible for a computer to make. A classic example is chess. A couple hundred years ago, the thought of a chess-playing machine was just a big joke. Ten years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the greatest chess player of our time.

But can computers innovate? If you look up the word “innovation”, the word “new” is mentioned repeatedly: new ideas, new dimensions, something new, etc. Convention has it that computers cannot think “outside of the box”. While computers can perform sophisticated logic and are able to “learn” patterns, they can’t really form new thought . A recent example of this is an article I was reading about Monitor110. They have developed some proprietary technology that allows their software to scour niche information sources on the Web (blogs, message boards etc.) and pick out potentially market-moving news before it hits the mainstream. So, their software can pick out the bits of signal from the noise, but it cannot determine if and how to act on information to bring financial reward and, moreover, outperform the rest of the market (the common term is “generate alpha” in the alternative-investment world). The formation of a unique investing strategy can only be performed by the human investor staring at the computer screen. The investor may utilize computer-based modeling tools to aid in development of the strategy, but the high-level strategy still is up to him to devise.

Will computers one day be able to innovate? Maybe. If and when scientists are better able to model the human brain, it may turn out that deep-down, it is, in fact, a deterministic system. If that is the case, it may be possible to model the human brain electronically.

Until this day, though, I do think, on the basis of the test I put forth earlier, that much of the knowledge in people’s brains is truly useless. Instead of just giving students knowledge, it is more important to teach them how to efficiently find knowledge when the situation demands it.
“Give a man a piece of knowledge and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to locate knowledge and you feed him for a lifetime.” Yeah I know..I’m a dork.

Ok, it’s way past my bedtime again. Maybe I’ll continue this thought in a later post…

I’ve gained incredible amounts of knowledge from the Web. Being a self-described “knowledge whore”, I’ve spent countless hours on sites like Wikipedia and howstuffworks.com as well as other sources of knowledge like blogs, newsgroups, and forums. Almost without fail, though, every time I find myself digging deeper into a topic, I quickly realize that the topic is WAY more complex than I had imagined it to be. Try it sometime. Pick a topic and Google it. For even the most obscure topic, the sheer vastness of relevant information on the Web is mind-boggling.

I realized today that even though the Web has given me volumes of knowledge and wisdom, above all, the Web has taught me this:

You don’t know what you don’t know.

The Web bombards us with this lesson because it’s so damned efficent at information retrieval. In minutes we can open gateways to knowledge sources that might have taken hours or days before. More importantly, though, the highly-linked nature of the Web supports a breadth-first search pattern of knowledge gathering. You might be reading about sub-topic A and in the middle of a paragraph follow a link to sub-topic B and so on. I’m sure you’ve done this plenty of times. While your initial intent may have been to perform a linear search to ascertain information on a specific topic, before you know it, you’ve spent an hour reading about 10 different sub-topics. In one hour, you’ve gotten a broad, but relatively shallow understanding of several sub-topics.

If you had been performing research thru offline methods, you would have found an information source (a book, news article, thesis, etc.) on a single sub-topic and digested it thoroughly before continuing on to the next source. This pattern of information gathering is more similar to depth-first search. Using this method, in the same time as above, you may gain relatively complete knowledge of 2 sub-topics, but not even realize the existence of the 8 other sub-topics that you would have encountered if you had followed a breadth-first search pattern. In other words, you’ll know more about less. With the Web, you’ll know less about more. The curse of the latter is that you will have learned of the existence of many more topics which only further increases the magnitude of how little knowledge you have.

Anyway, it’s late and it’s likely that I’m just rambling, so I’ll cut this post off now. In conclusion, even though the Web has given me tons of knowledge, the most valuale knowledge it’s given me is the realization of how little knowledge I actually have. My guess is that by the time I’m an elderly man, instead of feeling old and wise, I’m going to feel old and dumb. Very humbling…

A friend pointed me to www.screenvader.com which uses a very slick Flash-based UI for navigation. While the 3D-axis isn’t very natural to manipulate with a mouse, which of course is limited to a 2D plane, one can imagine that this would be quite natural if human hand movement could be used as the control mechanism. In fact, this immediately reminded me of so many sci-fi movies, like Minority Report, in which users interface with their computing environment using their hands.

We’re already seeing a trend towards UI’s with 3D perspective such as the “Flip 3D” window-switching feature of Microsoft’s new Aero interface in Vista. In a sense, a 3D is more space efficient since the “depth” of a user’s screen can better be utilized.