Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?

Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"

Comments

Oh my yes.

[Art Popp]

Whether it was building my first mock-phaser with "real flashing LED" or building the "Ultra-Sonic motion Sensing Alarm System" that I used to hear when my sister was getting into my room, there can be little doubt that Alan Dean Foster did more to inspire my love of technology than all the teachers in my highschool. Even today when I'm ohming out the different connections in my microwave to modify it so my CueCat sets the cooking time based on the barcode, it isn't because I can't turn the knob and press the button. It's because it's one step closer to a Replicator.

In a more practical mode, there is a great deal in software that is done by ignoring, "what will get the job done today" and paying attention to "what will bring me closer to an ultimate solution." This way of thinking is essential to good design and I can't think of a better way to inspire it than to give the designer several examples of near ideal systems, and the consequences that come from them.

Borges and the Chinese Room

[obtuse]

There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Libary of Babel, and it is a great illustration of an information theoretical point.

You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?

The Library of Babel contains every possible book of a certain length. The story is written from the point of view of a librarian in this library. This librarian has never seen a book of any meaning or interest, and has never met anyone who has. There are rumors, because the librarians have deduced that the library appears to have all possible books.

Finding the meaningful works in the huge search space will be much harder than composing them again intentionally, in fact humanly impossible unless you're starting from a very near point in the first place.

Extra credit question: See why an index or card catalog of the books would be of no real help?

Now, are you familiar with Searle's Chinese room experiment in AI? This is a room where you submit statements in Chinese and receive answers through a window. Supposedly the person inside doesn't understand Chinese at all, but only uses some set of rules to process the papers coming through the window. This set of rules allows him to compose an answer, possibly even passing a Turing test.

Does the system understand Chinese? Critics of AI would say not.

To me Borges' story illustrates a flaw with the Chinese room experiment itself. A sufficiently complex system can't be emulated without some kind of understanding.

It was a glorious feeling finding this for myself in Borges. I look at AI differently because of this story. I'm not coding AI, so maybe you aren't really interested in my opinion.

Extra credit answer: Any catalog or index that was sufficiently specific to be helpful would have to contain the needed information, and make reference to the library itself unneccessary. There is no Shakespeare finding algorithm that is perfectly accurate and doesn't already contain Shakespeare. See also pigeonhole problem.