The Engine

Occam’s RazR ^ | January 14, 2009 | Ike Pigott

[petitfour]

If you stare at the lines in the road, you’ll never see where you’re going.

While the Devil might be in the details, if you want to know where he’ll be you need to look for the pattern. Pattern-recognition is one of the trickiest pieces of programming, partially because we know very little about how our brains work, and partially because humans make it look so damned easy. Our brains are designed to spot and record patterns.

Sure, it takes a long time. Evenutally, enough memories gel to enable us to look back and assign confidence of some correlation (if not causation.)

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

That won’t hold up against the very best prediction engines we have, but it got us down that path. You go back and examine what happened before an event to determine what contributed.

Meanwhile, 200,000 people died at the end of 2005 because no one made the correlation that a big underwater earthquake might pose a problem. There was no warning for the tourists who were trapped by the wall of water. There was a warning for the Indonesian natives who knew that a sudden and unexpected ebb tide was a sign of a huge wave coming in. Many of the animals knew it, too.

It always seems far simpler when you know what the trigger is, instead of drowning yourself in a myriad of probably inconsequential details . . .