A Story of a Code Wars

It was on one day after my class had ended that I saw a couple of my friends sitting and talking, and I had decided to hang out with them.  Eventually their conversation moved onto the subject of some "Windward code wars" event, and they were trying to decide on members for a team.  Code wars?  "What is this?" I asked.  They answered something like, "Oh yeah, Daniel, you should be on the team.  I mean you're not too bad at this coding stuff right?"  Well it seemed to me to be some kind of team coding competition.  Competitive.  Coding.  With friends.  How could I not do it?  Competitive.  Competitive...

Maybe the idea of a coding competition doesn't sound that exciting to you, but I could already see the story lines going.  Clock ticking down, thirty minutes left.  You've got one last problem to solve, one last error to correct, and you've got to do it now.  You've got to put everything into that one shot, achieve your highest level of problem solving in that moment of pressure, and put it all together to type the code that will lead you to glory, to fame, to the title!..  And I laughed at myself as I always did.  How often does real life turn out like that?  Oh all the time you know.  All - the - time, haha.

I could already feel the nervous excitement building in me waiting for the event to start.  Although, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only one who could say that.  We would be competing against 7 (I think it was 7 but maybe it was more) other teams from our school, with the top 2 going on to the grand finals.  Some of the people, you could tell, weren't that into the event.  Some (like one of my teammates, cough cough) were there just for the food.  Most of the others were probably there willing to put in a reasonable effort, you know, do what they could.  And then there was me.  "We're gonna win this, right?" I said, half joking, half serious.  Because I wanted to shoot for first.  Not first in our school.  First internationally.  First in the grand finals.  Why aim for less?  The way I saw it, if there was even the slightest glimmer of hope that we could reach the top, then why not go for it?  Why not give it our all?  If in the end you find out you couldn't do it, well then, you couldn't do it, but as long as you believe there's a chance, why not give it everything you've got?  And I could see that chance, that glimmer of hope.  So I let my anticipation grow as we waited to receive the message that would tell us our mission.  Still, I couldn't help but feel that I might have been the only one in the room that was seriously considering the possibility of getting 1st in the grand finals.

From the problem to an answer; The power of logic; Rule-based knowledge is insufficient

For the final project in my machine learning class, one of my classmates asked if I would help them out.  It was one of the few times I got to see how other students approached solving problems, as I usually did all my work by myself.  And, while I did expect it, it still bugged me.  It seemed the only questions they asked were, "How did other people do it?" and "How can we take the ideas or the code that other people have produced and use them here?" and so on.  I wanted to ask, "Why can't we solve the problem ourselves?"  Maybe if these people were undergrads who didn't care much about the subject I could understand better, but these people were Masters and Ph. D. students.  I can't help but feel that at that level, shouldn't your focus be on understanding the problem well enough to solve it yourself?

Now, I don't mean to say that I think that that way of thinking should only be expected of graduate students.  I've heard enough to know that many people approach their class problems the same way: look at related things in notes or the book, ask classmates or the professor for help, and/or look on the internet for similar problems.  Now, none of that is bad in general, but there seems to be such a significant focus on building off others' work or others' knowledge and applying the methods of others, so much so that I have to wonder if people forget how to solve problems from the problem itself.  They'll say, "Movement in a network?  Oh that's a network flow problem and there's all these methods to handle network flows," or "That problem is one of classifying, so I'm going to test out a bunch of different machine learning classifiers."  That kind of approach will work, but if you go from the problem to an answer, rather than searching various answers to find one that applies to your problem, you can take more advantage of the things that make your problem unique.

A Broad, Long Discussion about Genius

First, I would have to consider the easy ways to get things wrong.  One way would be attempting to draw conclusions from the outside looking in.  It is not that appropriate conclusions cannot be drawn in this case; it is just that it's harder to have a sense that your conclusions are correct.  The same goes for considering different cultures and different personality types.  While I can't say that I believe I'm on the outside on the topic of genius, I am aware of the fact that I don't know for sure.  For all I know, maybe I am not a genius, and maybe I have no understanding of what it means to be a genius.  Next, even if I am a genius, I would have to be able to distinguish between things that are due to being intelligent, and things that are due to external factors.  For example, it would be very easy to say that a smart person would develop the same world view that I have.  It was developed through logical thought and well considered concepts, so anyone who thinks logically should come to the same conclusions, right?  I don't think so, because feelings and emotions have a significant impact.  For example, someone who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd is arguably making a logical decision when they decide not to go to a crowded place, while someone who enjoys crowds is making a logical decision when they decide to go.  In the same way, my individual sense of right and wrong and my own balance between conflicting ideas such as order and freedom and individuality and fitting in, all of the things like these play a part in my view of the world.  So, if individual emotions and feelings are not the same for everyone who is a genius, then then their world views will most likely not be the same either.
Anyway, with all that said, here are a bunch of thoughts on various topics related to the concept of genius.

A New Beginning

"It's a hard college," everyone said.  "Even high school valedictorians have to study hard there."  And I was just thinking, "I'll believe it when I see it."  I had enough experience doing things that were supposed to be hard.

For one, math was supposed to be hard.  People say, "~Oooh calculus~" as if it's some scary monster.  I would say, "What, calculus?  I finished that in 10th grade."  Well, calculus 1 and 2, at least.  That was the highest they offered at my high school, so I took online math classes from the nearby university my last 2 years.  Of course I aced all of those classes.  What did you expect?  Math was one of those things that just came easy to me.  They kept saying, "Do the homework and study because that's the only way you're going to learn."  I just wanted to tell them, "There are exceptions to that rule."

Hard Work vs Talent, and the Ironic Story.

There are many things that cannot be known for certain, but the fact that different people will require different amounts of hard work and effort to accomplish the same things is surely true.  How much variability exists in natural abilities and how much can and cannot be overcome through pure effort are things that I cannot answer.

To say that many of my past efforts were with the intent of providing insight into the truth of this matter... well, you might say that that's an understatement.  "What have you learned?" you ask.  What have I learned, I wonder...

Perhaps the best answer is... nothing.  I was one person.  How could I hope to form any meaningful conclusions from the analysis of only one person?  It might seem that I put a lot of effort into the things I did, and, well, I suppose I often did, but it wasn't optimized effort.  It wasn't effort with the pure goal of improvement.  I mean, what would you expect?  I wasn't completely willing to give up enjoyment for the sake of improvement.  It wasn't that there was no overlap between the two; it was just that it will always be true that I could've done more.  As such, I can't say that my efforts or abilities represent any limit.  They aren't the limits of my own abilities, so it would be ridiculous to look at them as the limits of human abilities.  The other point was that I was also not representative of the average person.  It's just true.  I was certainly not your average person.

I think it's ironic, you know.  Most people would look at me as someone who was talented, someone who was gifted, and yet here I was, writing a story that was perhaps as much hard work and effort as it was talent.  I could've stuck to what I was good at, right?  I should have, maybe.  But now you have to ask, what do my results mean?
If I were to write cruelly, I would say that everything I do supports the fact that there are things that are nearly impossible to do if you weren't born with the necessary talent.  Do you think you could do everything I can do? I wasn't born with every talent in the world, but I definitely had a lot of natural talent.
And, writing out of the extreme opposite perspective, I would say that, while maybe I had the benefit of some natural abilities, a significant amount of what I was capable of was the product of hard work.  Plenty of the things I became able to do were things that I initially couldn't even imagine being capable of doing, ever.  But, really, if you give it a lot of effort, there will be many times when the things that seem really hard will eventually become easy.  Basically, anything I can do is something you could probably become capable of doing too, if you tried hard enough.  Besides, I have experience of overcoming a lack of talent through hard work.  Just ask me about my days of running cross country.  Huh, what do you mean that story didn't exactly have a happy ending?

Another big question is: is there an ability to learn, or to pick up things, to improve?  Is that what intelligence is?  And if so, can you improve your ability to improve?  Can you make yourself smarter?
Definitions of intelligence aside, there may be an ability to learn, but it might not be a single ability.  For example, you might think of the ability to learn subjects in school.  That might not be specific enough, so you have to go deeper.  Split it into an ability to learn history, and an ability to learn English, and to learn math.  And maybe that's not enough.  It's an ability to learn math based on logic and theorems, and an ability to learn math through examples, and an ability to visualize geometry, and so on.
The questions go on of course.  Maybe you can't improve your general ability to learn, but it is possible to improve in small areas.  To what extent it is possible I can't say, but, for example, you can improve on your ability to improve at new rhythm games.  Now, can you take your improvements in learning rhythm games, and use them to also improve quicker in other genres of video games?  And, if so, can you take your improvements in learning how to improve in games, and make yourself able to learn more quickly in general?  If I had to guess, I'd guess that it's possible, but it could depend on your natural ability to inherently know the relationships between things that often seem unrelated.  Now, can you improve that ability?

The practical side of me says that, while it might be possible to make yourself a smarter person, the amount of effort it would require would probably make it a worthless goal.  There are times when you have to give an extreme amount of effort just to do something that others can do easily.  I have enough experience on both sides to know that.  With such a broad goal, not just to be better at one thing, but to be smarter in, essentially, everything, surely it would require even more effort.  And, not only that, there's no general well-known method as to how to become smarter.  What do you do, attempt to copy the strategies of those who seem to be smarter than you?  And what if it's not possible?  You'll spend your life trying to reach a goal that was never obtainable in the first place.

The dreamer in me says that this is something that cannot be proven impossible.  You can't say with certainty that it can't be done.  However, it is possible for me, as a single person, to prove that it can be done.  And not just me.  Anyone out there.  That story is there to be written.  And the story doesn't have to be black and white.  Success and failure do not have to be the only two words to describe the end result.  Even if you are unable to truly become smarter, I believe that the story of the attempt to do so is one worth writing.
And you ask, "Is that your story?" and I say, it depends.  Don't you see?  All stories vary when the perspective from which they are written is changed, and all stories evoke different emotions when the true feelings of its characters are changed.  It is my belief that these things are the keys to transforming a recollection of events and a list of facts into something more- into a story.  "So, what is your perspective?  What are your true feelings?"  And, with a reply that feels heavy, weighted down with its meaning and its implications, and powerful, proclaiming an alternate way of viewing the world and of living, and definitive, defining some kind of truth, some kind of certainty behind the person I was, I take a deep breath to, slowly, and with a sense of absoluteness not normally present, answer,
They vary.

The 2012 Turkey Trot

The Turkey Trot is one of two 5K runs that I've been running every year, so of course I have to get excited for it.  I was pumped up; I was like, C'mon, let me out there, I'm gonna go crazy on the course.  Well, that was until the 15 minutes before the race started, because then I started wondering why I was excited to push myself like I did in my cross country days and go through ridiculous amounts of pain and suffering to run only as fast as other people were running for fun...  I started to remember that fact that pounded itself into my legs and my mind every race when I used to run cross country: running isn't actually fun.

On Working Memory and Multitasking

Have you ever heard of limits like this?  Or things like this?  I've always wondered the value of searching for limits like that.  Take that first article, for example.  They say you can't remember 4 things at once, unless you use tricks.  Well if you're talking about something like a game, and saying that, without using some special input device, you can only do so much, then all right.  But when you're talking about the human mind and it's capacity to learn and remember, why would you consider a limit like that??  It's like saying, "If you memorize things inefficiently, then your limit is 4 things."  Well maybe, but why would you want to memorize things inefficiently?  You're saying I can only remember 4 groups of objects.  If I think of an individual object as it's own group, then I should only be able to remember 4 objects, but maybe if I remember objects in groups of 10, then I can remember 40, or groups of 100 for 400 total... something like that, right?  So where's the limit?

I feel the same about multitasking.  Maybe you can only focus on one thing at a time, or maybe only two things.  That may be so, but how do you view your "things"?  How many beats am I keeping when I play this?  (I can do the first half of the song with no misses pretty consistently now.)

It's 4 beats, right?  There's the quarter note, the eighth note, the 16th notes, and one more beat pattern.  But then I've had enough practice with things like that, so the quarter note and eighth note beats basically just feel like one rhythm to me.  So that's three beats, I guess?  But then, after practicing that song enough, I can see the whole left hand rhythm as a single beat.  So, two beats?  That's how I see it when I play it, but maybe if I was a bit better at it, I could hear the sync between the left and right hand parts and play both beats as one completely.  So, am I multitasking?  Am I not surpassing any limits because I'm seeing things that could be considered separate tasks as one?

See, I really believe that much of it depends on how you view things.  In many cases, there's a normal classification for tasks.  Like, you probably wouldn't say someone playing DDR is doing 4 tasks at once, even though there's 4 arrows.  It's just one game.  And someone playing Beatmania might be hitting 7 keys and the scratch, but you wouldn't call that multitasking between 8 things.  But then there is the option to play both sides on Beatmania.  Now that, that sounds like multitasking, right?  Well, I'm not so sure.  If you learned the game in that mode, you'd probably just consider it one game.  One task.  Now, if you learned the game in the normal mode, then you'd probably have your memory of playing the normal mode, and it'd feel a lot more like doing two things at once.  But, with enough practice, you could put them together.

Then there's another big question I have.  Who do they test in these kinds of studies, and how much practice do they get on the tests?  I don't think participants get to practice the tests beforehand, and I doubt that the people chosen are the best multitaskers out there.  Maybe that's good for knowing the average, but I wouldn't make any statement about a limit from a study like that.  I mean, imagine if someone randomly selected a thousand people to play DDR, and it just so happened that none of them were extremely experienced at the game.  It'll look like the hardest songs in the game are impossible to beat, for any number of reasons.  The people playing couldn't move their legs fast enough.  They couldn't process the information fast enough.  There were times when there were 8+ notes on the screen at once, and there's no way to remember that much information in working memory.  Well, maybe, but you improve on things like that with practice.  Which leads to another question: can you improve your working memory with training?  Can you improve your multitasking with practice?  I like to believe so.  I have nothing to mention on working memory specifically, but I have plenty of what you might call "multitasking training."  And, I feel like this form of multitasking is something that's gotten easier for me with practice.