Childhood memories wrapped in a research paper

 Last week, my student emailed me a research paper that was relevant to her work. Upon opening the paper, I found that it was written by two professors of IIT Bombay in the late 1980s. It is an elegant paper, so much so that we are finding it useful for the research being done in 2023, and I wondered about the amazing work that these professors did with little resources. But, the research paper also brought back the happy childhood memories - I sitting on the floor of my home in Delhi on a summer day, and wind blowing through the open gallery doors into our drawing room. Some dust on the floor. The coolness of the floor making it a comfortable place to sit. I wondered how important it is for a childhood to be happy. When you encounter something that takes you back to your old memories, and you feel happy, content, and then remember a funny event that happened during those days and you start laughing. 

Kunal Kamra and the Chocolate Factory

On the onset, I would first acknowledge that Kunal Kamra is a winner. No doubt about it. Otherwise, why would I be writing a blog on him. He calls himself a comedian. But he lacks the quintessential quality of being a comedian - humor. How do I know? I recently watched his invective-laden attempt at a stand-up comedy. Did not find him funny at all. Of course, I watched him because of the stunt he pulled off so successfully a few months back. Few months back, nobody knew KK. One day, KK was supposed to be flying to Lucknow. It was just like any other normal day. Little did he know that his flight ticket was bigger than what Charlie had won for the chocolate factory. It was bigger to him than the Peter-Parker-bit-by-spider-turned-into-spiderman event. Edit: "few months" is now a few years. This blog was originally written some years back. 

Writing

 I am planning to write something everyday. That's a difficult job when there is so much stuff to take care of. But, writing is important. It is difficult to write something that is catches a reader's attention. My first year in the US, we had some friends over at our house and one of them forgot their first three books of Harry Potter at my home. The next day me and my roommate were going to the library to study.  I was waiting near the door for my friend when he was collecting his stuff. As I had nothing better to do (there were no smartphones at that time), I picked up the 1st Harry Potter book. I had barely read a paragraph and I was hooked. There was no stopping then. I ended up reading the first six books and eagerly waited for the last one to be released. That's the power of writing. I have always felt that one important thing that kids should learn early is how to read. If one has the ability to read and comprehend, then they have to power to get back in their studies if they are behind. But, I now feel that along with a good ability to read, one should develop the ability to write coherent essays early in their childhood and should continue to write. That's a great skill. A typical research proposal is 15 pages long, but it is so difficult to write. A reason is that to write the research ideas that you are still cultivating, you need to understand what has already been done. That requires a whole lot of reading before you start writing. Once you have the ideas in mind, you put them on paper - something interesting happens then. The mere act of writing the research approach that you have in mind allows you to scrutinize the idea. Something that appears clear in mind often comes out muddy when written. It is something like introspection. We do not introspect for most hours of the day, but we almost always have some thoughts in our mind. So, most of our thoughts are never scrutinized. And so one never evaluates the subconscious emotions behind those thoughts. Nor one evaluates the biases hidden in these thoughts. If we write all our thoughts, we are making them more concrete, and revisiting them slowly. That's when the thoughts get evaluated. A friend of mine is a painter. He asked me, "do you know how many paintings did Picasso paint?". "No idea". He gave me some numbers to work on - suppose one paints X paintings per week, then how many paintings will the person paint? What he was telling me was that Picasso was Picasso because he had painted some insane number of paintings in his life. Some became masterpieces. But, you do not start by painting masterpieces. You paint and paint, like a running train. You get better and better at it. Your paintings become deeper and more elaborate. There is no act of humans that does not require persistent work.

History of Science

 March 2007. I looked out of the window of the airplane to see the snow-covered fields of Denver, Colorado where I was flying in to attend my first American Physical Society (APS) annual conference. I was quite determined to make good of this opportunity. I had the plan to attend all talks related to "behavior of water in confinement", which was my research project at that time. Next on the priority list was all talks related to protein adsorption and protein folding, followed by talks on new simulation methods. If I would not find talks on any of these topics during a time-slot then I had decided to attend any session that captures my curiosity. That was the plan and I followed it quite religiously for the first three days. On the afternoon of the fourth day, I did come across a time-slot wherein I could not find any talks related to the topics of my interest. So, I selected a session which sounded interesting, while totally not related to my field of research. I do not recall the name of the session, but this session has remained vividly in my memory for the last 14 years. The researchers were performing experiments in which they were dropping strips of paper from a height and were using slow-motion camera to capture the motion of the strips. They were developing numerical solutions to describe the motion of strips of paper falling down in air. Interestingly, this work was sponsored by DARPA - the research division of the army of the United States. NASA has been sending missions to moon and far-away planets, F-16 and 18s are soaring the skies and we do not understand how a strip of paper falls under the action of gravity in air. Interesting. The session led an indelible impression on me. It is important to understand what we know and what we do not. The scientists know that there are simple-looking phenomena that we do not understand. Interestingly, it is the non-scientists who think that we know a lot more than we actually do. When I started my graduate studies, I got to know that Prof. X works on studying the properties of water. Water! Don't we know everything about water already? I asked myself. Fast forward five years and I attended a conference on water where the leading scientists of the world were arguing about the structure of water and the debate got hot a few times. 

Our theories, our knowledge of science is constantly being updated and what we think of something as true today may turn out to be quite wrong in the future. It may be useful to learn about how scientific ideas evolved over time. Most of us know about the story of ether that was thought to be permeating the empty space, or the story of black-body radiation that led to quantum mechanics. Around a century back, scientists believed that chemical reactions occur because different molecules have different shapes - hydrogen is a ball, oxygen is donut shaped and so two hydrogen balls fit well on both sides of the donut to form water. We now know that this picture is incorrect but I would be careful to say whether our current picture is completely correct. I think I have painted a gloomy picture. Should we throw away our science books? No! Our precision and accuracy of experimentally probing physical systems have been steadily improving. Computational research has grown quite rapidly and is aiding our understanding. We may not completely understand quantum mechanics, but we do have a mathematical structure for it that describes quantum phenomena quite accurately. The number of people pursuing research has been growing. The amount of research money being invested has also been overall rising at the global level. Research is shared digitally and is not obscurely available only in few libraries of the world. At Intel, we used to say that "not all zeros are the same", implying that at the start of a new technology, even though our yield for working microprocessors remains zero for long periods, but we keep making improvements in removing defects. Similarly, all "lack of understanding" is not the same.

Ramanujan and Shakuntala Devi

Ramanujan had a phenomenal ability in mathematical logic. Shakuntala Devi had the ability to perform mind-boggling calculations at a breath-taking pace.We can learn many things from knowing that humans like Ramanujan and Shakuntala existed. One is that there is a configuration of our brain that can result in such super-human abilities. Both Ramanujan and Shakuntala lived pretty normal life otherwise. This tells us is that a normal brain is not at a Pareto optimal level. Which is good news because it means that one does not have to sacrifice any mental functionality to achieve the abilities of Ramanujan or Shakuntala Devi. Another observation - they were both born in pre-independent India in poor families. Ramanujan received his education nothing out of the ordinary. Shakuntala Devi was not formally educated in school. This implies that starting your kids early in the tried-and-tested mechanisms of teaching so that they are successful in school early in their lives may not be optimal. It is low-risk strategy which will dumb down kids.

Brain is a physical object after-all. And, it operates by sending signals between its millions of neurons. This implies that there is a certain connectivity and configuration of neutrons that can allow one to think like Ramanujan or do calculations like Shakuntala. Can we design such a brain? Not at present, but maybe in the future. What do we need? We need to first figure out what is the critical size of the configuration of neurons that needs to be trained. Ideally, one would like to tailor the entire brain, but that may not be practically feasible. Once we know the critical size of connections that we need to optimize, then we need to figure out what to optimize. Which configuration results in a Ramanujan brain? Is that configuration unique? It is most likely not unique, because, first, in that case the probability of existence of Ramanujan becomes diminishingly small. Secondly, that would mean that any new experience or learning would change this configuration and the brain will become sub-optimal again. So, an ensemble of configurations should work. Great! But, what is the objective function that should be optimized? I do not think we know the answer of this one as well. Once we have figured out these questions, then it comes to the logistic part of physically designing such a configuration. How do we assemble neurons in a configuration? We will probably not start attaching single neuron to others from scratch. That's not possible. We will probably need to scan thousands of brains for their connectivity and select candidates that have closely related networks. This exercise will also tell us if the brain's ability correlates positively as we move towards the optimal configuration in a continuous manner, or will we see a step-change in the intelligence. If the process of optimization of networks is invasive, one needs to somehow grow that brain in-vitro. Then, we start optimizing the connections.

Rubik's cube: Marshmellow test for adults

I could never solve the Rubik's cube. What is it about this cube? The objective is to have all same-colored squares aligned in rows. So, one starts by aligning some of the same-colored squares. But then there is a catch: you need to destroy partially formed order/structure so as to further increase ordering in the cube. That is, in the intermediate steps, you need to undo what work you have done previously for reaching the globally optimum configuration. I think solving a Rubik's cube is a good measure of risk-taking mentality of people. Those who are scared to loose what they have for a better reward in distant future are unable to make such moves, and thus never solve the cube completely.

Politicians

Many years back when I was in India, I was watching an interview of Mr. Narayana Murthy, the chairman of Infosys. He was narrating a story about a meeting he had with the politicians of his state Karnataka. Apparently, the politicians were planning to promote their regional language, Kannada, while dissuading English education in state-funded schools. Murthy went around the table to ask each politician where do their kids go to school – all the kids either went to the best schools in India or abroad, and of course, they were all learning English. Amused, I told the maid in our house how the politicians in Karnataka are trying to promote their regional language in school over English. She replied that we should ask where do these politicians send their kids to school. So, one does not need to be chairman of a software company to figure out what the politicians are up to. It is in their favor to keep the population less educated, less equipped, economically weak and subordinate to them, as this will allow them to keep their powers unchecked and unquestioned. I had told the maid of this incident because I knew that she had made extra efforts to ensure that her kids learn English. Less education does not mean that a person is a fool to fall into the tricks of the politicians. Fools are fools. The people who look up to politicians as their leader for guidance in each step of their lives are the ones who are easily duped and manipulated. 

Fast forward to 2016. The prime minister of India announced one fine day that within a few hours, the currently circulating currency notes will no longer be valid. Everyone needs to get the notes exchanged with the new ones being issued by the RBI. This created a huge turmoil for many months with long queues in the bank, people losing their daily wages, small businesses suffering a loss in revenue, etc. The leaders claimed that this will clean the economy of black money. I was watching a popular news debate “The Big Fight” on NDTV – the topic was demonetization. A young girl from the audience said that “she is willing to stand in the line to get the notes exchanged. Our nation is being built and we should all look forward to that”. That comment sparked an emotion of hope and patriotism. Everyone clapped. I also felt a tinge of emotion. An year later, the Government admitted that they could not recover any black money. People had found ways to get their black money converted to white via many new avenues that had sprung up overnight. The entire experiment was simply like an ant colony optimization scheme – the conditions changed, a large number of people started figuring out the best possible way out, many loopholes and methods were identified and voila – we are rich as we were before. The young girl on The Big Fight was not from a poor family (people from marginal backgrounds hardly ever make up the audience of TV shows). She must have not suffered much. Who suffered were the poorest of the poor. They don’t have any say in the news channels as yet. In December 2016, just a month after the demonetization announcement, I was visiting some remote areas of Malwa region of India. The artisans over there gladly took a bank cheque as a payment for our shopping, but they told us that the nearest banks are many miles away. The workers they hire for block printing do not have access to banking – they get their wages in cash, they use boxes to store their money or sometimes dig pits in the ground to hide their savings. Most of them are not educated and are quite unaware of what is happening in the country. At the time of demonetization, they lost all their savings. To get their notes converted they had to walk many miles to queue up outside the bank. Those days banks were running out of newly issued notes. So, even if they spend their day not working but going to the bank, there was no certainty that their money will be exchanged. Great job Modi. 

It is said that Modi is a PM who connects with the people. I heard a part of the speech he delivered at the Madison Square Garden. He made two jokes, one that man is now a slave to the mouse (referring to a computer mouse), and the second that it costs more money per mile to take an autorickshaw in Ahmedabad than the per mile cost of ISRO’s Mars mission. I did not laugh. Thanks to Whatsapp, I had heard these jokes before. So, we have a PM who goes center-stage and cracks whatsapp jokes. Not surprisingly, he connects to the people, as that’s how we do small talk in our drawing rooms. All fluff and no substance. As an example, when Raghuram Rajan talked about buying and selling of dosas to explain an economic concept, it became famous as Dosanomics. The leaders of yesteryears apparently made the mistake of presenting political, social and economic issues as serious matters.