Imagine you are a thief, or a lock picker. You stand in-front of a fat locker which needs a 5 digit numeric code to open. If you do not know anything about the key number that opens it, you need to try 10*10*10*10*10 numbers to open the locker(in the worst case). If you try to key in all possible combinations until the lock opens, your procedure is essentially brute force. And chances of doing that in reasonable amount of time are very slim.

Instead, suppose that the locker has a small bulb that glows green, if you choose a digit that exists in the key number. Say the key is 74231, and you start choosing the first number from the 9 digits in the decimal number system. The small bulb glows red until you key in 7 for the first number, at which point it turns to green. Finding it reduced your effort by a factor of 10. Continuing this process until you find the right key takes utmost 10+10+10+10+10 trials.

The important point to note here is the existence of the bulb that gives feedback for each digit in 5-digit number. Though your process may seem random, it is not very so – the search process is directed by the feedback. In Darwinian terms, this feedback is called natural selection, and it is framework that random mutations work in, and this process as a whole is called Evolution.

So the next time somebody says Evolution is random, counter them by pointing to the existence of the feedback mechanism.

The approximation I here am talking about is approximation of the world that every one has, probably it is more accurate to put it as “personal view of the world”. For feral children the loneliness they grew up with, the animals they were raised by, is their view of the world. Now, everybody has their approximations, but it is important to think why approximations exist. To start with, the world itself is infintely complex, and it is impossible to have the complete model of the world. So we end up with approximations. That does not answer the question though. Approximations exist because, that is one possible way one can interpret the present and thus predict the future. Mathematically speaking, it is akin to something like regression or curve fitting.

Growing up is a lot like a computer booting itself up. First you have a seed, a small set of data which consists of something like, you should cry when you feel hungry or pain. Accompanied with it is your, dare I say, intelligence. Then, there is the environment you grew up in. Human mind, for all its complexity and intelligence responds greatly to two simple things viz., pain and pleasure. Resembling a small feed back machine, the brain tries to build a model of the world, to predict the future and thus make you more comfortable.

My new tagline, that world is a set of idiots, me and geniuses, is an approximation. Being jobless and searching for one, I cant seem to see the world any better . But it is still an approximation, not a true fact, and thus wrong. All behaviors of the people we see around is a result of their perspectives. Inferior complexity, superior complexity, optimism, pessimism are all approximations, and probably incorrect ones at that. What does one require the most to better depict the world? The answer is the subject of my next post, intelligence.

There is a lot of exciting stuff to discuss there, so keep visiting. I promise to update my blog sooner this time .

Did you ever think about your deep inbuilt behaviours and when since they are with you? Chances are that those are with you since ever, you knew about yourself. Why are these so inbuilt and why is it difficult to improve or change them? Lets take a look at children whose childhood is markedly different from ours, how it affected them and attempt at an explanation.

Case in point, Feral children: A feral child, by wikipedia, is a human child who, from a very young age, has lived in isolation from human contact and has remained unaware of human social behavior, and unexposed to language.

See the wikipedia article on feral children. I think its pretty interesting. A feral child is either isolated, confined from humans or raised by animals. Yep, you read it correct. The gist is, these children, when exposed to the outside world, do not live long. Not that they would have fared any better if left unexposed. These children have their strange ways and behaviours that are natural to them as walking or talking is to you. Children raised by animals behave like the very animals that have raised them. Children raised by wolves or dogs, can talk to them as naturally as you talk to other people. They howl, bark, have an inbuilt fear of humans and are more comfortable walking on four legs. Human mind seems to have a tendency to copy in concrete and re-act what it learnt in its early days. Its akin to a blank slate(May not be completely blank, I am charting into muddy waters here.), that is waiting to be written to, no matter what actually is written. This actually is true of some other animals too.

For more information on feral children, see feralchildren.com

(To be continued …)

Earlier I used to wonder ” why do people blog?”. I now seem to understand it. Blogging is to news what democracy is to governments. News corporations are well, monarchies. But, how can blogs replace news? You dont read blogs with a cup of coffee every morning, do you? How do you know where to go? Somebody might have covered some news very well, or wrote an interesting editorial on something. But then how do you know about it? Then I realized that people have already solved this problem. The solution is to have a group blog like slashdot, digg and others. The articles can be posted by anybody, but selected by a group of people who are diverse in their views and values. This site, wordpress.com allows such a facility. Blogging rules guys, it really does.

PS: Why do the news channels in US, always show an elephant when they talk about outsourcing to India. I am an Indian, and the only elephant I ever saw was in the zoo.