State

Looking at what is happening in Iraq, Syria and Libya it is difficult to miss the necessity of State, even in its crudest form. These nations have become battlegrounds of world powers, with armed unrest everywhere, and exporting refugees to neighboring countries. Some of the Syrian cities are 90% darker now, during the night, compared to pre-war days.

At times, we get enraged hearing about atrocities of governments, jailing dissidents, torturing political prisoners and even killing normal civilians to instill fear in certain section of populace. But, all of it pales in front of the armed unrest that we see in countries like Syria. Each neighborhood of a city controlled by a different group, bombing each other on a daily basis, it is just a killing machine on the ground. There is nothing but rubble in vast swathes of cities of Syria. People live jungle life, not knowing when they get killed, in a constant fear of loosing access to basic necessities for survival. It is not difficult to imagine, what a child growing up in these cities is going to look forward to. It is a generational curse, that won't be healed for decades to come.

In these modern days, State is as necessary as it was in the days of Babylon and Nineveh, to protect the islands of civilization from advancing jungle.

New

New things have a charm with them, that they always bring some excitement, whether good or bad.

In the routine monotony of life, new things are justifiable cause for long wait and enthusiasm. With friends, it is new projects, new products, new cars, new gadgets that fill most of the conversations over lunch. At home, I have been waiting since morning to put to use the new shave gel, I bought yesterday. New year is obviously, much celebrated, for no easy reason.

The excitement for new, goes down with one's age. It becomes more and more clear that so called new, is nothing but old repeating itself or reenacting itself. New government is nothing different from old government. New guidelines are no different in impact than the old ones. New people are no different from those already we already know. New gadgets are nothing but e-waste waiting to expire. New after-shave, already turned out to be a disappointment, with no burning sensation.

That is why older people seem less excited, and call the more excited ones, childish, with a silent sense of wisdom. After living for long enough, it is difficult not to get the logic of life, how monotonous and repeating it is.  

Mathematics

As they say, mathematics is the queen of all sciences (and Gauss is the prince of mathematicians, to finish my list of list of monarchs). Long time ago, when I was still innocent, I even heard it is the language of all sciences. But my curiosity with maths did not survive for long after finishing preparing for exams. Exams were the main motivating factor besides trying to impress the teacher, and to feel like I am smart. What is smartness but a  result of constant prodding by people around us, 'all hail the smart man, the getter of highest marks, the doer of all home work, the retainer of top rank'. That is why, one should always join less popular schools to feel smart, to feel great. I have had the pleasure of joining a few of them, most of the cases. Once I feel I am useless for anything, everything is an improvement.

Coming back to maths, with its closed reasoning, seemed just awaiting death, when I sensed the openness of algorithms. Unlike maths, one can perform an much as one wants, and say that is the current worst case performance, and can be improved in the future, with respect any algorithm. That is why some algorithms survive with full respect despite being 'trivial'. But maths sees everything in black and white. The recent influx of artificially intelligently optimizing algorithms made mathematics look even ancient, and out of time. After all what is the fun in creating a few axioms(that are so obviously true, that we feel like wasting ink writing 'axiom') and playing with only the truths that can be deduced from axioms? Compare with the endless possibilities (there is one that can even drive a car) offered by inductive reasoning with every atom in the universe. Who will do the  purposeless search down the tree starting from axioms, to lemma, theorems (and corollaries)? Teach the computer to walk the rope, and it can find all the ends.

And so, I dethroned mathematics from its place thinking algorithms and inductive learning will surpass the silly search down the tree. But the silly search did hit its edge, sooner than one could have expected a few decades ago. Computing power is getting plateaued while algorithms are stuck with non deterministic polynomial time turing machines since the 70s. Algorithms and computation has hit their limit, the same one that mathematicians have been trying to solve since a few thousand years.

At the end there is only one problem, and that is search. Every other solution is a variant of the search problem. Someone once asked Diagenes why he carries a lamp with him all the time, and he said he is searching for a Man. Maths is just a way of practicing sciences in a way that gives legitimacy to our inability to solve the search problem. We just say maths is hard, instead of, well, I cannot solve the search problem. I recently fell upon the fact that Maths and computer science used to be part of same department called maths department. Let's hope both strands of smart people come together to solve the search problem, and hope they can also find the answer to why we are here, and what are are we doing here. But it should also include a caveat that kings once upon a time used put on the smart people, that either they should solve or risk being thrown out of the kingdom.

Partial Knowledge

Knowledge is the source of all intelligence. Human have the most efficient knowledge processing technology in the brain that can process vast amount of data acquired from sensory organs, extract useful information from it, reconcile new information with existing knowledge, and finally store it for efficient, almost instantaneous retrieval when needed. But, knowledge acquisition is a murky process like all the physical processes. There are lot of imperfections at all levels. Raw data is corrupted, noisy, biased, dependent on state of numerous variables. Information extraction from raw data is dependent on prior prejudices, current state of mind, and future expectations. There are always unpredictable human agents around us trying to influence how we acquire new knowledge, how we form our beliefs. In a way, mind is in a continuous struggle with past and surroundings, to make sense out of world around it.

In this scenario what helps brain is its ability to acquire partial knowledge based on partial conclusions. Partial knowledge is in a way a game of probabilities. Brain adjusts its beliefs as more and more imperfect knowledge is acquired, hoping that in the long run its beliefs are more or less in line with what is actually happening around it. Imperfect knowledge is also easy to acquire, and scalable with amount of data available. It is more difficult to form firm beliefs than to form loose beliefs that can be adjusted with time and experience. 

In contract, it is difficult for deterministic machines to form partial beliefs. It is more easy for them to believe 1+1 is 2 than to allow for other possibilities based on constantly changing variables. This is  an important reason why intelligent machines are still quite far away. They are very primitive as of now.