Overcomplicated
Page 16
the way machines count: Machines—or more precisely, programming languages—can of course also enumerate starting from one, but many programming languages today count from zero. The reasons are old and have been forgotten by most programmers, but a good discussion of the history is Michael Hoye, “Citation Needed,” blarg? Mike Hoye’s weblog, October 22, 2013, http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/.
the writer Scott Rosenberg notes: Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), 6–7.
“suddenly become opaque and bewildering”: Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 186.
100 billion sentences: Actually, to avoid duplicate sentences, it’s really 10,000 nouns × 1,000 verbs × 9,999 nouns. It would still take more than 30,000 years to go through these sentences.
from the linguist Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994; repr. HarperPerennial, 1995), 205.
“This is the cheese”: Quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 95.
Consider Kant Generator: Program via Mark Pilgrim, Dive into Python: Python from Novice to Pro, updated 2004. Available free online: http://www.diveintopython.net/xml_processing/. While this program allows for embedding clauses within others, it seems that Kant Generator is not in fact infinitely recursive, as it will always terminate.
structures known as garden path sentences: This example is from “Garden Path Sentence,” Wikipedia, accessed April 29, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence.
our mental-processing limits: Another example is the number of steps we think through when strategizing our decisions based on what we think others think and will do, as described by game theory. Few people think many levels deep (“I will do something based on what she thinks I think that she thinks that I think . . .”). For further reading, see Colin Camerer et al., “Behavioural Game Theory: Thinking, Learning and Teaching,” Caltech Working Paper, http://people.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/web_material/Ch08Pg_119-179.pdf.
For most of us, it’s about seven: George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” The Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97, accessed April 30, 2015, http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/.
eight seconds to transfer: Lin Zhong, “Limitations of Human Mind,” lecture notes for ELEC513/COMP513, Complexity in Modern Systems, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, accessed April 30, 2015, http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~mobile/elec513/humanlimit-2.html.
million times slower than a computer circuit: Bostrom, Superintelligence, 59–60. For long-term memory, other estimates of storage capacity give vastly larger volumes, such as 2.5 petabytes. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/.
delicately optimized by evolution: Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig, “Why Aren’t We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 6 (2011): 373–77.
“Funes the Memorious”: Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 131–37. I have chosen to retain an alternative, quite common translation of the story’s title.
the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991; repr. Washington Square Press, 1992).
programmer and novelist Vikram Chandra: Chandra, Geek Sublime, 48.
what is known as The Knowledge: Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” T, The New York Times Style Magazine, November 10, 2014, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/london-taxi-test-knowledge/.
outliers, impressive as they are, have limits: César Hidalgo coined a term for the quantity of information and knowledge any one individual’s head can hold: a personbyte. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows.
John Symons and Jack Horner at the University of Kansas: John Symons and Jack Horner, “Software Intensive Science,” Philosophy and Technology 27, no. 3 (2014): 461–77.
sometimes at the expense of human meaning: Stanisław Lem examined this kind of incomprehensible complexity several decades ago in Summa Technologiae, trans. Joanna Zylinska (orig. pub. in Polish, 1964; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 96–97.
Google recently turned powerful computational methods: Jim Gao, “Machine Learning Applications for Data Center Optimization,” Google White Paper, www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/assets/machine-learning-applicationsfor-datacenter-optimization-finalv2.pdf.
To quote Google’s blog: Joe Kava, “Better Data Centers through Machine Learning,” Google Official Blog, May 28,
2014, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-through-machine.html.
it wouldn't necessarily be meaningful: Douglas Heaven, “Higher State of Mind,” New Scientist 219 (August 10, 2013), 32–35, available online (under title “Not Like Us: Artificial Minds We Can’t Understand”): http://complex.elte.hu/~csabai/simulationLab/AI_08_August_2013_New_Scientist.pdf.
design a type of computer circuit: Note that this circuit was actually evolved in hardware (each member of the population was instantiated in a field-programmable gate array—a type of programmable circuit—rather than being simulated), while many evolutionary algorithms occur entirely in software. Adrian Thompson, “Exploring Beyond the Scope of Human Design: Automatic Generation of FPGA Configurations Through Artificial Evolution (Extended Abstract),” 8th Annual Advanced PLD and FPGA Conference, 1998, https://web.archive.org/web/20101215100211/http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ascot/paper.ps. See also Thompson, “An Evolved Circuit, Intrinsic in Silicon, Entwined with Physics,” in Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware, ed. Tetsuya Higuchi et al., Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 1259 (New York: Springer, 2008), 390–405, available online: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
“Not only is it ugly”: Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 338.
In the realm of logistics: Steven Rosenbush and Laura Stevens, “At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver,” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-ups-the-Algorithm-is-the-driver-1424136536. On the blog Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok refers to this kind of intelligence as “opaque intelligence.” http://marginalrevolution.com/marginal revolution/2015/02/opaque-intelligence.html.
the economist Tyler Cowen noted: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 72.
“both praised and panned”: Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
“slow, tortuous reading”: Flood and Goodenough, “Contract as Automaton.”
when forty-five tax professionals: Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 12–13.
I have on my shelf three books: Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004); Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone (New York: Plume, 2007; orig. pub. Saddle River, NJ: Pi Press / Pearson Education, 2006); Leonard Warren, Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
As the writer Philip Ball notes: Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (Chicago: Universit
y of Chicago Press, 2013), 55.
point made by the writer Patrick Mauries:Ball, Curiosity, 156.
According to the scholar Daniel Boorstin: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983), 414.
the words of Frederick the Great: Quoted in Boorstin, The Discoverers, 414.
some professors chose their titles: Ball, Curiosity, 120.
the mathematician Isaac Barrow noted: Quoted in Ball, Curiosity, 120.
“more and more about less and less”: John M. Ziman, Knowing Everything About Nothing: Specialization and Change in Research Careers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), v.
a theory about the “burden of knowledge”: Benjamin F. Jones, “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?” The Review of Economic Studies 76 (2009): 283–317. This theory is primarily focused on knowledge related to technological progress.
In one article coauthored by Jones: Benjamin F. Jones, E. J. Reedy, and Bruce A. Weinberg, “Age and Scientific Genius,” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2014).
more than 36 million books: “Fascinating Facts,” Library of Congress, accessed March 2, 2015, http://www.loc.gov/about/fascinating-facts/.
The biologist E. O. Wilson described the change: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; repr. Vintage Books, 1999), 42–43.
driverless cars is a good example: Jordan Bell-Masterson, “Innovation Series: The Rising Costs of Invention,” Growthology, March 24, 2015, http://www.kauffman.org/blogs/growthology/2015/03/innovation-series-increasing-costs-of-invention.
attempt to visualize these patterns of teamwork: Michael Ogawa and Kwan-Liu Ma, “Software Evolution Storylines,” SOFTVIS ’10: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Software Visualization (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2010), 35–42, available online: http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/papers/softvis_storylines.pdf. Also see http://www.michaelogawa.com/.
“Of all the monsters who fill the nightmares”: Brooks, Mythical Man-Month, 180.
CHAPTER 4: OUR BUG-RIDDEN WORLD
the video game Galaga: “But the questions always nagged for the past decades. Was the cheat purposefully added to the code as a backdoor for players in-the-know? Or is the cheat a glitch in the software—an unexpected side effect that persisted over several releases of the game ROMs? If the cheat is a glitch, what is wrong with the code? Is there another sequence of actions to get to the disabled state faster?” Chris Cantrell, “Arcade / Galaga,” Computer Archeology, accessed April 29, 2015, http://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Galaga/. I have also seen an argument in favor of its being an intentional cheat, as discussed here: Jason Eckert, “The Galaga No Fire Cheat Mystery,” October 31, 2012 (updated May 2014), http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2012/10/31_The_Galaga_no_fire_cheat_mystery.html. I first learned of the Galaga glitch from Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013).
how we realize that we are in the Entanglement: Distinguished Google Fellow Urs Hölzle: “Complexity is evil in the grand scheme of things because it makes it possible for these bugs to lurk that you see only once every two or three years, but when you see them it’s a big story because it had a large, cascading effect.” Jack Clark, “Google: ‘At Scale, Everything Breaks,’” ZDNet, June 22, 2011, http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-at-scale-everything-breaks/2/.
In 1950, Alan Turing noted: A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433–60. Widely available online, e.g., http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.html.
a widely used simulator of gravitation: There are about 10,000 mixed-precision instances (the specific type of error) across about 1,000 lines out of approximately 30,000 lines of code. John Symons and Jack Horner, “Software Intensive Science,” Philosophy and Technology 27, no. 3 (2014): 461–77; J. K. Horner, “Persistence of Plummer-Distributed Small Globular Clusters as a Function of Primordial-Binary Population Size,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Computing (CSC) (Athens: CSREA Press, 2013), 100–106.
These bugs range: One estimate places the number of bugs at one every three to five lines of code, an astonishingly high number. Roger A. Grimes, “In His Own Words: Confessions of a Cyber Warrior,” InfoWorld, July 9, 2013, http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611471/security/in-his-own-words—confessions-of-a-cyber-warrior.html?page=3.
In 1996, a computer “bug detective” published: Bruce Brown, Nigel R. Smith, and Bruce Kratofil, The Windows 95 Bug Collection (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 3–10.
when a software project becomes twice as large: McConnell, Code Complete, 652.
Take the Boeing 777: J. M. Carlson and John Doyle, “Complexity and Robustness.” PNAS 99, Suppl. 1 (2002): 2538–45.
According to two scientists: Carlson and Doyle, “Complexity and Robustness.”
the computer scientist Philip Koopman has noted: Koopman, “Case Study of Toyota Unintended Acceleration,” slide 20.
has released a series of books: See the fascinating works by Kate Ascher: The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005); The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011); and The Way to Go: Moving by Sea, Land, and Air (2015), all from The Penguin Press, New York.
a water main broke in Weston: For further reading, see “Massachusetts Water Crisis,” The Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/specials/Water_crisis/.
the physical infrastructure of the Internet: Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2012).
All the bugs cannot be eradicated: This point is also discussed in Roger A. Grimes, “Shellshock Proves Open Source’s ‘Many Eyes’ Can’t See Straight,” InfoWorld, September 30, 2014, http://www.infoworld.com/article/2689233/security/shellshock-proves-open-source-many-eyes-wrong.html.
Gmail—Google’s email service—suffered an outage: Jon Brodkin, “Why Gmail Went Down: Google Misconfigured Load Balancing Servers (Updated),” Ars Technica, December 11, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/why-gmail-went-down-google-misconfigured-chromes-sync-server/.
a blog post from Google in 2006: Joshua Bloch, “Extra, Extra—Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken,” Google Research Blog, June 2, 2006, http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html. Also discussed in Chandra, Geek Sublime, 124.
The bug is a window: A glitch is “a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure.” Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, “Glitch,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, 110–19 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 114. Errors and bugs as a window into improving a system is a concept also explored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012). For an application of Taleb’s concept of antifragility to software development, see Martin Monperrus, “Principles of Antifragile Software,” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3056.pdf.
at the beginning of 1982, the Vancouver Stock Exchange: This story about the Vancouver Stock Exchange index has been told in numerous places. I have primarily drawn from these sources: Anne Greenbaum and Timothy P. Chartier, Numerical Methods: Design, Analysis, and Computer Implementation of Algorithms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 117; Kevin Quinn, “Ever Had Problems Rounding Off Figures? This Stock Exchange Has,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1983.
software known as Chaos Monkey: Chaos Monkey is available online at https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey.
The physicist Enrico Fermi: Quoted in Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 162.
only 53 kilobytes of high-speed RAM:
Data point found in George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 4.
CHAPTER 5: THE NEED FOR BIOLOGICAL THINKING
English physician named Nathanael Fairfax: Brief biographical data is from the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, vol. 18, “Fairfax, Nathaniel, M.D.,” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_18.djvu/143. Note that the given name is spelled differently on his published articles, but the biographical details make clear that this is the same person.
“Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature”: Nathanael Fairfax, “Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature, Both in Men and Brutes; Communicated by the Same,” Philosophical Transactions 1666–67, 2 (1666): 549–51.
back in Woolsthorpe: Newton also spent some time at Cambridge during these plague years, where he did work as well. Information on Newton’s life and work can be found in these sources: George Smith, “Isaac Newton,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/newton/; V. Frederick Rickey, “Isaac Newton: Man, Myth, and Mathematics,” The College Mathematics Journal 18, no. 5 (1987): 362–89.
“great tragedy of Science”: Tania Lombrozo, “Must Science Murder Its Darlings?” NPR 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/01/26/266784786/must-science-murder-its-darlings.
The physicist Freeman Dyson has described: Freeman J. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, repr. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004; orig. pub. 1988), 40.
biologists, as a rule, have a greater comfort: While Darwin was a unifying force, he was also clearly a diversifier, with great attention to complex detail. Shane Parrish, “What Made Charles Darwin an Effective Thinker? Follow the Golden Rule,” Farnam Street, January 11, 2016, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/01/charles-darwin-thinker/. Other fields outside science have a “biological” tendency as well. For example, historians tend away from abstraction and generalization in order to understand history.