Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There was a time when this was how science was done, wrote Jon Turney: “Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally.” But now? “All the action is in silicon — not in the world, or even the lab.” ‘Silicon’ as in algorithms, data mining and computer simulations. Kevin Kelly noticed this trend in his 2008 article where he pointed out that Google Translate uses “zillions of datapoints which in aggregate link "this to that" from one language to another”. What does that technique for understanding, he wondered? “If you can learn how to spell without knowing anything about the rules or grammar of spelling, and if you can learn how to translate languages without having any theory or concepts about grammar of the languages you are translating, then what else can you learn without having a theory?” George Box famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Box’s comment became all the more ...

Most of us have wondered (and cursed) why they taught us the proofs of theorems and formulae at school. Why weren’t we taught only to apply that knowledge instead of deriving what was already known? At that time, it seemed like yet another useless practice of our education system. Only much later have I understood the value of knowing the proofs. It was not the proof itself that was of consequence. Rather, what’s important is to know the assumptions behind that formula, conclusion, model or whatever. Because only by knowing the assumptions can we know when that model is invalid. Or if it is missing anything. Ever seen the flight route from Bangalore to London? It’s a curved path. Why is that? Isn’t the shortest distance between two points a straight line? That “fact” (a line is the shortest distance between two points) only holds for a plane surface . For a curved surface like the earth, a (particular) curved path is the shortest distance between two points. You can see a demo of...