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Go Metaphors for Life and Strategy

Ever since being introduced to Go in grad school, I've loved the game. It's simple. I can teach you the rules in 5 minutes and you won't likely forget them. Basically, each player gets black stones or white stones. You place a stone anywhere on the board during your turn. If your stone becomes completely surrounded (e.g. if every space it's connected to contains a stone of another color) then the stone is captured. But if you extend your stone by connecting it to more of your stones, then the whole group must be surrounded by stones of the other color in order to kill it.

That's how to play. That's it. The only other chunk you need to learn is how to score. During the laying down of stones, each player creates bounded territories that they control. At the end of the game, each player gets a point for every open position they control, and a point for every captured stone or stone in their territory that is obviously capturable (called "dead" stones).

From Go's simplicity there emerges a great wealth of complexity and strategy. And "emerge" really is the right word here, much of the complexity is an emergent property of the simple rule set. Case in point – two eyes. If you form a group of stones that has two separate open spaces ("eyes"), then that group can not be captured. This isn't a rule of the game, but is just an outcome of the rules already mentioned above. Why can't you kill a group that has two eyes? It's because you can only put down one stone at a time and killing a shape with two eyes would require you to put down two stones simultaneously – which you can't do.

Something I like even more about Go are the metaphors that seem to apply well in strategy and tactics of everyday life. The following list was me + AI working together to collect a set of those metaphors, and I wanted to put this in my blog here so that I could refer back to it and add to it later. Enjoy!

On Scrupulosity

Dear fellow spiritual traveler,

You made a wrong turn along the way. Maybe the map was upside down. You find yourself alone in a wilderness... that is, aside from hidden pits that make you ever vigilant; aside from tangling vines that impede your progress; aside from lonesome howling winds; and aside from the silence – the absence of the only voice you really want to hear. There is a light at the distant horizon, and you must reach it ... or maybe it was a mirage. – Why, oh why, couldn't you have been one of those crystal rubbing hippies? At least they act like they've figured it out. At least they seem... at peace?

The Brain's Amazing Ability to Process Stereo Sound

There's a lot of amazing things about how the brain works, and in this post I'm going to explore the phenomenon of binaural hearing – that is, your brain's amazing ability to hear with both ears ("binaural"), combine the signals, and quickly extract useful information in a way that I think should basically be impossible for the slow meat-computer that it is. Crazy stuff! Here we go!

Face

Julia ... a short story

I wrote the first draft of this in roughly 2017 but left lots of details out. I happened to run across this again about 2 weeks ago and it now seems quite apropos for the time we're living it, so I spruced it up a bit, added some of the missing details, and here I'm publishing it. Enjoy!

Tool Invocation – Demonstrating the Marvel of GPT's Flexibility

I know it has to be true – The magic of human-level cognition isn't the result of a brain in which every single piece is perfectly tuned for its very special and isolated task. Instead, there has to be some simple "principle of computation" that is repeated throughout the brain; some component that, when replicated throughout the brain, gives rise to this emergent property we call intelligence. Sure, we have a motor cortex, specialized to control movement. We have a visual cortex, specialized to process information from our eyes. And we have a pre-frontal cortex that assimilates all this information together and plans what to do next – "That's a snake! Don't step on it!" But there is evidence that the base circuitry that makes up all these modules is actually quite general. At every point on the neocortex, you see basically the same pattern - an interwoven computational "component" composed of 6 layers of stacked neurons. At every portion of our cortex this pattern is, with very little modification, repeated. Besides the similar morphology, there is other evidence that the computational components are general. In several really weird brain rewiring studies, they have redirected visual input to the auditory pathway and shown that animals can compensate quite well - effectively "seeing" with the part of their brain that was rightfully intended to hear stuff! (Mice (Lyckman et al., 2001), ferrets (Sur et al., 1988; Roe et al., 1990; Roe et al., 1992; Roe et al., 1993; Sharma et al., 2000), and hamsters (Schneider, 1973; Kalil & Schneider, 1975; Frost, 1982; Frost & Metin, 1985).)

The Primary Objective of Software Design: Minimizing Total Cognitive Load

Over my half-career in software development, I've started to collect some insights (or at least opinions) about how software can be built so that it is easy to maintain, use, and extend. Usually we hear of principles such as modularity, abstraction, loose coupling, and separation of concerns, and each of these is important to strive for. But I've found that behind all of these, there is a single, unifying principle – the reduction of cognitive load. In this post I talk about what I've come to think of as the primary objective of software design: minimizing total cognitive load of all future users and maintainers of your software.

Edvard Munch"s the Scream but setting at a computer, looking at the screen, and typing angrily

Similarity Search for Grouped Content (Teaser)

Vector search has taken the world by storm. The idea is this - cast documents into a vector embedding space via some transformation (e.g. BERT) and then index them into a vector database that is capable of fast approximate nearest neighbors search. Then when the user makes a text query, cast their query into this same embedding space and find the nearest vectors to the query vector and return the corresponding documents.

It occurred to me today while staring at the sky blankly, that this type of search won't work when searching for grouped content. For instance, what if I go onto Reddit, and I'm not really looking for a single reddit page, but I'm looking for an entire subreddit that matches my interests. Here I'm not looking a document, but a group of documents that match my intent.

  • 3 min read

What's a "Mind Meld Teaser" Post

I realized today that I don't write blog posts most of the time. If you were to look at my private notes, for every blog post that I've published here, I have probaby 10-20 half baked ideas that would be great to write about... but I just don't have time to get around to them. Why not? Well, because frankly, writing a blog post is a time risk. If I determine myself to write a post on some Friday afternoon, it's very possible that I could be signing up for a whole-weekend work task, or even more if it's really a good post. Some good posts require research and creating proofs. All good posts require lots of time for actually crafting the text and refining it. What's more, blogging is a rather lonely task. All this preparation I do alone, and that takes me away from time I could be spending around people – which I much prefer.