Micropost: Creativity vs Productivity!

This is my thesis about the relation between productivity and creativity.

Creativity tools for the 21st Century

As a Computer Science researcher I constantly need to read articles, and books, and pieces of code here and there. The amount of information you receive everyday is ever growing. While you are reading an article, you may get inspiration for a way of solving a similar problem in a different context. There should be a way of storing all these information, and ideas otherwise we might easily loose the most brilliant idea of the 21st century without knowing it. Some couple of thousand years ago, man came up with the idea of using pen and paper to write down his thoughts. We are still stuck to the same idea, write things down on a paper. With computers, now we don't need to use ink anymore, it's all digital on a computer. But the basic idea is the same, we convert our thoughts to a set of words. Thoughts described in couple of words that usually are took out of context, sometimes can be useful, but a lot of times can be overlooked because of lack of contextual information. I think human mind can not handle a certain level of complexity, specially dealing with multi-disciplinary problems which require various information from different contexts; Not with traditional tools. For us to produce new knowledge at a growing speed, we need to increase our capacity of handling more information. We need to build creativity tools of the 21st century. The closest idea I found to this was the idea of Memex by Vannevar Bush, a mechanized memory aid tool. But it doesn't seem like it's been taken that seriously. I think this might be as important as education itself.

Prophets of Science Fiction

I just recently discovered this amazing documentary "The Prophets of Science Fiction". It's created by Sir Ridley Scott, the director of the movies: Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, Body of Lies, and the recent Prometheus.

The documentary covers the greatest works of English and American science fiction pioneers, including:

• Mary Shelley
• Philip K. Dick
• H. G. Wells
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Isaac Asimov
• Jules Verne
• Robert Heinlein
• George Lucas

You may have read the novels, or have watched the movie adaptations of the stories written by these authors but seeing them all at once, and in an organized manner created by one of the greatest directors of our time makes the documentary nothing less than a joy to watch. The documentary also goes beyond a typical literary survey, and investigates the science beyond the science fiction stories. You will be amazed to find out that science fiction writers got quite close to discovering modern physics concepts even before scientists.

All that said, Ridley Scott himself seems to be a little bit ignorant about the creation of the world. Somewhere in the documentary he says and I quote: "for us to be sitting here right now is so illogical mathematically can be proved to be impossible, so you have to ask along the way who pushed and pulled and adjusted, to make us be what we are now today."  This is specially strange coming from an English man! The same Britain who gave birth to Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking, and other scientists who proved why this is not impossible.

But don't let that disappoint you. It's an amazing documentary!

The Walking Dead: The Game

I started playing "The Walking Dead: The Game" a couple of days ago. I played the first episode, and thought it was good but I suspected the game might not be able to keep up with the intense and fast paced story. Surprisingly though not only the quality of the story and the game generally didn't drop in the next episodes, but it got better and better until the end. A lot of recent games have been trying to push the boundaries of video games, from what it used to be just fun to play, to a multi-dimensional experience that involves a story, decision making, strategy, and etc. Among all the game developers who have tried, very few succeeded in making a memorable experience for the gamers. I think Telltale games has managed to do this a couple of times, but The Walking Dead surely brings the experience to the next level.

I was thinking to myself what was it that made this game so good? Looking at most of the AAA games produced by large game studios, you can see a lot of attention has been put on making the best graphics. Telltale though has a completely different approach. While they make good looking games, the technology used in their game is far from the state of the art. Instead they tried to make a truly interactive movie like experience focusing on story telling and character development. I tried to make a summary of different aspects of the game which made it a great game:

Setup: I can't think of any setup better than this. The walking dead has a survival setup where the smallest mistake can lead to very bad end results. 

Team: The fact that you are part of a group also makes character building a lot easier for the writers, as you constantly dialogue and interact with other characters throughout the game. 

Mystery: In The Walking Dead you encounter strange characters and dark places. Curiosity to unveil mysteries and solving the puzzles is a big driving force throughout the game.

Responsibility: I think perhaps that was one of the biggest pluses for The Walking Dead. Very early in the game you become responsible to take care of a little girl. Your decisions from then effects both of you, and the character building has been done so well in the game at some point you feel like you only care about the girl's future and not much of your own character's.

Fast paced story: It doesn't make you waiting for the next mystery to solve, or the next decision to make. There's always something that keeps you busy thinking and unlike most games it's not hunting rabbits in the jungle or collecting wild flowers but things that matter in the story.

Evolving characters: This is one of the very few games in which characters' personality evolve throughout out the game. This is not limited to the main character, it includes almost all the other characters you encounter in the game as well. They are like humans dynamic and unpredictable.

Unpredictability: While in most games that adapt to player choices, you can easily predict the outcome of a certain strategy and make decisions to reach your goal, in The Walking Dead you find yourself often to be wrong in predicting the game. Yet, the outcomes perfectly make sense, but like reality every outcome is the result of a myriad of factors which are often not under your control. The fact that you fail to predict the game, makes your decisions in the game more personal and consequently you feel a close relation with your character in the game.

How machine learning will change the world

"philosophy is dead"

The other day I had a long discussion over the Stephen Hawking's (and by the way my number one hero) quote "philosophy is dead". As you can imagine, I was the only person in the crowd who thought Stephen Hawking was right! Hawking argues that science and particularly theoretical physics has advanced so much that philosophers weren't able to keep up with that.

One of the counter arguments I was hearing was that philosophy never meant to answer questions about the world but to raise questions that people haven't thought about before. Even if you reduce the role of philosophy to that still I would say this is not a good argument. People who have expertise in a field are the ones who can ask the right questions. A person who doesn't have the basic knowledge about the laws of physics can be easily misguided, and end up with poor explanations of natural phenomena, in that sense a philosopher will be no better than a priest.

"we are no more than biological machines." 

Over and over I hear from people outside the science world, and amazingly also from some people inside the scientific community that they think humans have something that machines will never have. Here again I have to refer to Stephen Hawking's saying "we are no more than biological machines", and by machines it doesn't necessarily mean silicon based machines, but the important thing is that our behavior is determined by a dynamic model in a deterministic way.

Freedom is an illusion. We are as free as a computer program, the only difference is that we are way more complicated than any man made machine which have been built so far to replicate human behavior. But can we ever build an artificial intelligence which is as smart or even smarter than a human? the answer is absolutely! We have already made computer programs which can beat human performance in specific tasks, now we only need to go a step further. Why haven't we managed to build such an AI so far? Firstly, the field is quite new, specifically the new branch of AI which is referred to as "Machine Learning", is quite new. Most of the tools that we are using now in machine learning community have been developed in last 20 years or so. Secondly, human brain has tremendous amount of computational power. That means to be able to compete with humans we need extremely fast machines. I'm not sure if we are there yet, but I think current generation of hardware is quite close. But I would say  that's not the difficult part, even if we have a machine as fast as a human, we still need the model, the brain. What's nice about machine learning is that you can build models based on data, but that requires time to gather the data and process it. We humans sure took our time to gather this data and natural selection did the processing for us. I'm talking about one billion years of evolution. Does it mean that we need one billion year to train a model as powerful as a human? I seriously don't think so. Natural selection is an effective completely unsupervised method. With small amount of supervision we can save a lot of processing time.

One net to rule them all

I'm not sure if people outside the field are aware of what's happening in the world of machine learning. People got quite excited about the come back of neural networks. This year we had two pretty unexpected news from neural network community. Apparently they managed to beat the state of the art methods in computer vision, and speech recognition by a significant margin with biologically inspired artificial neural networks.

Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs

Want to know more, check out the pages of these two ANN legends: Geoffrey E. Hinton and Yann LeCun. I'm sure you will hear more from them soon.

ANNs have been on the corner for quite a while, but thanks to new advancements in electronics, we can now build massive networks on regular consumer GPUs in reasonable amount of time.

If you look at papers published in Computer Vision conferences you will see that people have been mostly trying to extract maximum information from very small and limited datasets. While this is good for understanding the Vision, but for building a system that actually works like a human brain you will probably need to use big data. Unfortunately most of hand designed methods fail to scale to massive amount of training data. Now that's where these small artificial neurons can do wonders. One of them is just a linear operator, with an activation function. You combine one billion of them together and they can translate Chinese to English!

Now the question is how many of them it takes to make the AI in "2001 A Space Odyssey"? Perhaps the more important question is how can we train such a massive network? What's the input? What's the output? What's the objective?

I think we will find out soon. So... watch out for the cyborgs!

Interactive Comics

Today I was playing with my iPad that I came across a few very nice Apps. First one was Madefire, which is a comic app like nothing I had ever seen before. It gives you a movie like experience as it has animated figures and also music and sounds effects. I downloaded a few comics on their store including Mono which I went through its first three episodes, and I liked it a lot. The only disappointment was that the store was quite small, there were only a handful of comics, but all of them were free. I suppose it will not remain like this for long.

Anyway, I was quite impressed and looked to see if there are other apps like this on App Store but I couldn't find any. Instead I downloaded the Dracula interactive book. Actually I'd started reading this book a while ago, and I was in the middle of it, but I liked using the app to read it a lot more. A cool feature of their app was that you could interact with some of the objects -- stuff like the crucifix and letters -- in the book. This may not be the best way to read a book for your eyes, but it sure is a lot more fun!