I’ve been playing with Apache Hadoop lately to get my head around MapReduce and Distributed File Systems. Its quite an interesting subject. Facebook, Google, Twitter and all the big players of the internet use the techniques to scale at an insane level. However the issue we are finding is that they are closed systems. Unlike email which had a POP protocol, a gmail user can send emails to hotmail users and vice versa, most of the web systems are closed and don’t seem to work well with each other.

One of the other big problems is that machines don’t know they are machines and they can talk to other machines. Programmers still need to code custom things, machines aren’t able to self program themselves and adapt their behaviour to make our lives more streamlined.

The worst part is every application comes with a “Help” manual but normal users can never figure out how to use help to solve their problem. Google does a far better job. Are our books and the way we write text manuals flawed in a way that we don’t yet understand how to properly represent knowledge and compute it ? But even google is naive. Google is a crawler and indexer. They can give us a list of pages where the information exists, unlike wikipedia or stackoverflow which allows generation of massive amounts of organized data.

My gut feeling is that to make the semantic web work, we need to somehow understand how knowledge works, how we can efficiently represent insane amounts of data and be able to compute it to make smarter decisions.

At the company where I work “RocketBoots”, every project presents a new challenge. From Web Programming with HTML/CSS/JS, to Mobile Programming on Android, Objective C, to RIA’s with Flex and C# to serverside CF/PHP to embedded development with Python/C/C++ to Highly distributed programming with erlang and hacking languages such as LISP and Clojure. I am one of those grateful that gets to work across a range of programming languages and problems.

I’ve been noticing a trend though. I think there is a fundamental problem that almost all code editors and compilers treat code as text. But in fact all code we write is a structure. Its like a tree. The IDE’s that do understand the language like Eclipse allow magnitudes more productivity in getting things done. Imagine 10 years down the lane, what would it be like to program ? I think one day everyone will be programmers, but not with the programming languages we have currently.

As it was mentioned in the post before

People don’t want computers or software, they want what computers and software can do.

I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot lately. When I learnt coding we had a text editor like vi in which we wrote code. It was painful, I had to check the documentation on what function accepts what parameter. Then I found eclipse, which had all the autocompletion mojo and I soon found myself debugging more code rather than fixing compiler errors. Eclipse had a model of the grammar, it would know all the possible things that could go in place of the keyboard cursor. I think the human brain is better left to solve problems and the computer can be left to use its 2 billion ops a second power for predictive analysis on what the user is going to type next. I have yet to see a code editor with serious machine learning algorithms that can learn from billions of lines of code in open repositories and figure out a language’s EBNF structure, figure out what is the probability of a function being used and offer a great experience to the coder.

So there is this whole field of “HCI” dedicated to figuring out “how do we lay the screens, buttons, text fields e.t.c so users really like our application”. Its a very interesting problem.

I’ve been thinking of a problem as well. Given a description of data, and its validators and controllers, can the view automatically create itself ?

I spend a lot of time doing some css and html cutups recently, and I’m very much in the process of “can I automate this whole thing ?”. After working a few years with computers, this is what I have learnt at least.

People don’t want computers or software, they want what computers and software can do to make their life better. The game is to show something on the screen, that the user sees it with his eyes (output), and responds with his hands (input) to complete the task the user had in his mind.

Tests of a good HCI

Explorability – What does the machine have to offer in an organised fashion. Every option should be a valid one, and options can be categorized into subsets. It shouldn’t allow the user to make mistakes such as forgetting simple things as putting a “dash”. Classic example of why using the terminal is so frustrating. Having good and simplistic documentation makes it very easier for the user to understand what an app “X” is about. The mouse allows explorability and the keyboard allows fast search. Bringing a combination of both gives serious power.

Search – once the user has learn’t what the machine has to offer, it should allow the user to execute his tasks in the fastest way possible. Adapting to the user’s problem. The machine should have some way of representing the user’s problem in an abstract manner by learning from user’s actions and try to help the user as much as possible. More like predicting and code completion. A good example is how google uses instant search box to almost always figure out what the user is going to type. I use eclipse’s “Ctrl+3″ function to search eclipse’s command quickly and finish what I had in mind.

Intent & Responsiveness – The user should be able to easily see what the machine is doing, e.g loading, waiting  e.t.c The more responsive and subtle the interface is, the more desirable it becomes. A good example is how apple nails the UI. Using a Mac in terms of usability is years ahead of windows or Linux.

Learning – The Interface should be able to execute common tasks very easily, it should be simple to start with and more complex functionality can be introduced with deeper exploration. This is one thing I think linux could improve on. there is bzip, gzip, zip, tar e.t.c Why can’t we have just one utility called “archive” that can compress to any format and uncompress from any format. More like “vlc”. Most common tasks shouldn’t need a zillion params.

Console to GUI

Yesterday I had this idea in mind, can I quickly generate UI’s for terminal apps like SVN, GIT, ffmpeg e.t.c ? The advantage of unix is its shell and the pipe system is that one can easily take very simple unix apps and pipe them together to do intelligent things. On the other hand the advantage of windows apps is that user can do a lot with point and click which makes it very simple to interact with the computer. Can we take the best of both worlds and join them into one ? That would be seriously quite an awesome achievement.

On the bottom line, I think If we need to make computers more intelligent and less frustrating to the common user, we need computers that can self-program themselves to orient around the user. Software that optimizes for happiness … now that’s something worth doing.

Excellent question. Why do you want to know ? because intelligent people change the world in amazing ways. Geniuses who figured out how the world works, ruled the world. The great things we have now come from geniuses. This is a question that has bugged me for years. Is it possible to create a software that would emulate Intelligence ? is it possible to write self evolving software that would outperform manually coded software ? Geniuses fascinate and excite me. Looking at the “full list of Nobel prize” winners, TED.com as a part of my weekly media diet, one soon realises that they’re full of very intelligent people who do Intelligent stuff. If we can solve the problem of “Intelligent Software”, so many other problems can automatically be solved. This is sort of like the “Utlimate problem”, waiting humbly for someone to battle their heads against. This is also known as “Artificial Intelligence”, but I am so surprised that its 2011, and yet millions and millions of apps are made without a single drop of “AI” algorithms. The field started in 1940′s and yet my laptop and phone are both very stupid pieces of hardware and software. There is one thing that fascinates me more than anything “software that programs itself”. I’d very much like to see this happen.

Define Genius ?

According to the Dictionary it is

genius |ˈjēnyəs|

noun ( pl. geniuses )

1 exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability : she was a teacher of genius | Gardner had a real genius for tapping wealth.

2 a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect : one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century.

3 ( pl. genii |ˈjēnēˌī|) (in some mythologies) a guardian spirit associated with a person, place, or institution.

• a person regarded as exerting a powerful influence over another for good or evil : he sees Adams as the man’s evil genius.

4 ( pl. genii ) the prevalent character or spirit of something such as a nation or age : Boucher’s paintings did not suit the austere genius of neoclassicism.

Intelligence  Genome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI – Its something we build that exceeds normal human intelligence. So how do we go about building this damn thing ? Scary but fascinating.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for months now. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

1. life engine – The root algorithm that maximizes survival. The program needs to be running as long as possible. It should modify/replicate itself in a way that it its always stable and running.
2. knowledge engine – model of how the world around including itself of the machine is and how it works. Its not explicit facts but probabilities of how much of a “concept is true”. The more the concepts get validated the higher the probabilities get, and new concepts start with very low probability “hypothesis stage” and then get validated to “theory stage” and then to a “law stage” as more of the concepts get validated. It can also base its trueness on other similar organisms who have been around for long and have been promoted as “authorities” by their peers (like how mums and dads work)
3. computation engine - Due to the deep desire of survival, the software needs to be very good at predicting what’s going to happen next and orient itself to fit the situation. It needs to try millions of possibilities and calculations in its mental model and resolve to an answer that has the highest chance from the knowledge (model) it already has.
4. perception engine – Taking input from the various input devices such as  light, sound, pain, chemicals (taste/smell) and storing this data for validation of existing knowledge and learning new patterns.
5. response engine – output devices to interact with the world, arms, legs, speakers, and also communicating with other similar devices who could help it survive e.g learning from them, The idea is to adapt to the situation.
6. learning engine – reflecting upon what it thought was going to happen and what actually happened. Based on this update the knowledge map. I guess the learning engine and the knowledge map are the key points to Intelligence.
7. Communication engine – Communicate to other peers about what they have learnt, and what you have learn’t. This is to take advantage of the “Collective Intelligence” phenomenon. More like “specialize and exchange”. Loads of individuals working together to act like a much bigger and powerful individual.

If you’ve been reading the previous blog posts, this is close to what I’ve been thinking as “neuronet” or “Human Digital Cloud“.

How do we fit all these together ? I don’t know, but when I do, I shall let you know

I understand this post is going to give a lot of whacko comments, but I recommend you read this at your own peril. They are barely thoughts written down after some creative day-dreaming.

7 Characteristics of Life is a good basic explanation. I am very much into the subject of “What Life is, and how it works”. It fascinates me.

So … we know Life is made up of minute cells which each hold the blueprint of the entire organism in their DNA. The first part is to figure out how nature’s programming language and how its operating system works. Nature’s engineering is fully recyclable. Animals die, they decompose, provide nutrients to trees, trees leaves get eaten, the animals that eat the leaves are eaten by other animals and the food chain continues, without food animals starve to death and give what was taken back to earth. Now that’s some serious sustainable engineering there. I hope programming DNA might be possible in my time. But then with power comes responsibility. The more intelligent the human species becomes, the more stupid things it will sometimes do out of a curiosity drive, not knowing what the results will be.

The cells then organise themselves to form organs. The cells are able to organise themselves and execute different functions on what cells neighbour them. The cells can regenerate if they get damaged. This is a hard problem to solve. None of our engineering techniques currently achieve this. Imagine buying an iPhone seed, plant it in the soil, wait for half an year and have a full iPhone. When the screen gets damaged, simply leave the iPhone in water with minerals and the screen regenerates itself. Now that is some serious engineering.

Like robots, living things interact with the environment. More intelligent species have a better map of the environment and how it kinda works in their brains than less intelligent ones. Using the nervous and the motor system they interact with the real world. The real genius of nature are that the organisms it engineers are such that they are built to survive. Some trees survive for 5000 years, human almost survive for 100 years if they take good care of their bodies. Kinda sad how most products engineered nowadays are planned for obsolence. i.e planned to breakdown just after the warranty period is over to enable more and more consumption. Very few mechanical products last even 20 years. A species which has components that built for plug and play would be awesome. Imagine one looses his arm, he can throwaway the broken one, cremate it in the soil, and get another re-generated arm, plug and play (like USB).

Outperform Nature’s Genius

Over 1000′s of years, we’ve studied nature and the universe around us like nuts, we know a lot about it now. But knowing isn’t the only game, making something better based on the knowledge is the real deal. If we fully understand how DNA code works, and how we could program it, simulate it, debug it. Then it would mean we can create machines out of nature’s building materials, we can program them for mechanical updates. May be we can even create organs which connect wirelessly to our human brains. We could probably connect all of humanity together to make Earth like a “giant living plant with a brain of its own”.

I think before the year 2100, we could achieve a close version of what could be Human 2.0 (fascinating documentary).  The amazing progress of computer science, neuro science, and biology, we could be the first species to manually evolve ourselves outperforming nature’s evolution algorithm creating what we call “HomoInterconnecticus”.

As seen again and again, when something new arrives, there is first a boom, then a fall, and then things stabilize. The journey to Human 2.0, will not be smooth. Its going to be both scary and fascinating, but it well worth it.

Looking back at the post “You press a button and we do the rest“. It seems I may have gotten a few things wrong, but in my opinion whoever works hard to push the world forward and make the quality of life better is a pretty successful person. I would give him a very cuddly hug as a reward at least. hehe!

Firstly let’s try to define what Innovation means.

Introduce, new ideas, products or methods to make our and others’ quality of  lives better.

In terms of commercial and open source, there are pros and cons that need to be tackled from both sides. I have been thinking about this very much lately as everyone talks about the same thing again and again and again “Innovate or die“.

Commercial

• Runs on the capitalist idea – make something that people want, get it to them and charge them a bit in return. The economics of demand and supply are in work.
• To foster innovation and ensure others don’t steal our great ideas, and allow us to move even further, sometimes we might want to protect it with patents or just maintain control on the intellectual property.
• money can buy the resources to make us happier and more powerful, hence “status and power” are a great motivators to encourage us to put our best. Status and power is somehow hardcoded into every animal’s brains since birth. The survival of the fittest.
• Currently it seems there is a widely observed view that commercial guys push a bit more innovation than the just-academic guys, at least as I have experienced it.
• Sometimes the commercial guys play bad games and stifle innovation with their egos of power and status. The small guys get crushed even before they get a chance. (Insert microsoft history here).

Open Source

• Runs on the “want not, waste not” philosophy. Sharing is caring.
• Specialize and Exchange TED talk by Matt Ridley says it well. Open source promotes the sharing the ideas and source code, as in computing terms copying is not stealing. Everyone gains; it is by this principle that we as humans have come so far ahead.
• The “2020” ericson ideas campaign talks about the notion of “connectiviy is productivity”. Even hardware blueprints by “openfarmtech” are helping solve poverty. Arduino is making frog leaps in hardware. The Internet running on open connectivity seems to be humanity’s biggest invention.
• More and more of the world runs on open technologies. The web runs on open technology protocols. TCP/IP – HTTP – FTP – POP3 – SMTP – SSH  e.t.c
• It promotes the hacker ethics :- Information should be accessible to all and free, mistrust authority promote decentralization, innovators be judged by their skills and not bogus criteria such as caste, skin colour, age or gender and technology can change life for the better.
• Great Open Source projects such as Wikipedia show what could be achieved by noble collaboration. Its the largest pool of organised human knowledge.

How do we maximise innovation ?

I guess smart developers need to get rewarded with their talent. The way Silicon Valley pays top bucks for developers who have great talent for execution of their ideas. I saw a documentary “True Story of the Internet”, in Silicon Valley where disruptive tech innovation happens, million dollars is nothing, if you have the next big idea and are able to execute it, fresh grad students from stanford, MIT and hardvard have a great history of becoming the youngest billionaires. This is one reason why once in my lifetime I’d like to work in Silicon Valley (Geek Heaven). Its an experience to be had. This is a city that knows how to reward innovation and brain cycles used to move humanity forward. Its frankly quite amazing how many things happen there.  Here is a philosophy I have come up in my life on how to spend my free time.

Invest heavily in solving problems that can make life better. Computers can make increase the quality of life (if you know how). They can help us make better decisions. Computers are becoming an extension of our brains.

Computational Thinking

While talking to a co-worker named Jason Hooker. I quickly drew him a diagram of what I think runs behind every successful web idea. We are heading one step closer each time to a “semantic web”.

1. Data Collection – This is either through users filling in forms, uploading media, capturing user activity or some automated web crawling bots trying to make sense of existing web data.
2. Data Organization & Storage – This data is then stored in databases which are organized in some meaningful manner, for quick retrieval and computation.
3. Data Retreival & Computation – Based on user’s preferences or what goes in his mind, The data that the user wants is computed. This also includes “Recommendation Engines” – giving the user what he wants, before he even asks for it.  At the heart of google adwords, facebook friend suggestions, amazon product recommendations, Netflix movie recommendations are some very very smart algorithms.
4. Presentation of Data –  This is where good interface design, layout design, animations e.t.c comes into play. Data should be able to adapt to different devices and screen sizes. The speed at which it responds to different user queries and how it responds to user queries is also a big player.

In short I now understand that technology is about people and delivering them what they want. Deep inside every human lie some “desires and wants” that are hard coded. We cannot change them, its what makes us “tick” as a being.

I’d like to build some tools that normal users could use to do the about tasks without getting too deep in “geek” land. . Who wants to fund me ?

This was quite an amazing documentary, I recommend everyone watch it http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-science/

Below is an excerpt

For thousands of years we have wrestled with the great questions of existence. Who are we? What is the world made of? How did we get here? The quest to answer these is the story of science.

Each week, medical journalist Michael Mosley traces the often unpredictable path we have taken. From recreating a famous alchemist’s experiment, to following in Galileo’s footsteps, and putting himself in the hands of a hypnotist, Michael unpicks how science has changed the way we see ourselves, and the way we see our world.

It is a tale of courage and of fear, of hope and disaster, of persistence and success. It interweaves great forces of history – revolutions, voyages of discovery and artistic movements – with practical, ingenious inventions and the dogged determination of experimenters and scientists.

This is the story of how history made science and how science made history, and how the ideas which emerged made the modern world.

1. What Is Out There? How we came to understand our planet was not at the center of everything in the cosmos.

2. What Is The World Made Of? How atomic theories and concepts of quantum physics underpin modern technology.

3. How Did We Get Here? Michael Mosley tells how scientists came to explain the diversity of life on earth.

4. Can We Have Unlimited Power? The story of how power has been harnessed from wind, steam and from inside the atom.

5. What is the Secret of Life? Michael Moseley tells the story of how the secret of life has been unraveled through the prism of the most complex organism known – the human body.

6. Who Are We? The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.

This guys just proved that you need knowledge, technology and big balls to solve the current world’s problems, not just bot loads of money. Money can buy the resources, but first you need the knowledge to know what to buy, otherwise it just ends up in someone’s pockets or ends up wasted.

http://vimeo.com/16106427

I loved David Christian’s Tech Talk about the “Big History Project” about complexity. I’ve orded the “Simply Complexity” book from Amazon to learn a bit more about it. Almost every TED talk talks about the importance of knowledge and intellect.  I think once we understand how exactly brains work and we can connect our brains together to form a much more massive one, it will be an explosion like the internet fostering innovation at one hell of a crazy rate. Let’s call this idea “neuronet”. So … now we have 5 big mammoth project ideas to work on.

• Implement “GeniOS” to power every internet connected device and build a massive neural network.
• Figure out how to map the entire human knowledge like our brains do in our bodies into neuronet. I thought google was going to do this, their motto was “organise the world’s information” but I think their CEO is a bit more concerned with “Social” at the moment. I wish someone could employ me to work on this problem full time. I think this week I’m gonna go back to UNSW, to see If I could enrol in a phD to work on this dream.
• Figure out how life’s software code “DNA” works. Our electronic machines are not doing the job, they’re creating too much pollution and not sustainable. We need organic computers, that grow from soil like trees do and when they die, they go back to nature.
• With neuronet try and solve the world’s current problems. The world is suffering massive poverty issues. I like Bono’s quote. “where you live should not determine whether you live“.  They’ve got brains just as smart as anyone of us. Poverty, corruption, racism are all man made problems, nature has nothing to do with it.
• With the above 3 figure out other habitable planets and somehow figure out how to send life to other planets with a compressed version of neuronet in it.

Sounds very science fiction, but … its the science fiction that drives us into the future.  Technology accelerates the process of dreams to reality, this is why you should always respect geeks.

Some part at the back of my mind says, “anyone who will read this blog will arrive at the solution, that I am going mad”. Well! I’m gonna say, “I’m having great fun thinking about it, I love brains and code”.

Here’s another great idea that came to my mind after sleep. lol! Its a very weird fact but all this crazy future ideas come to my mind after sleep. I think I need to keep a journal of ideas like leonardo da vinchi.

According to HPC, each of our human brains is about a 40 petaflop and 3.5 petabyte super computer. Considering that we have about 7 billion people on this planet. This would mean the total computing power of nature is about 280 zetaaflops (21 zeros) and 24.5 zetta-bytes (21 zeros). Even if there was a redundancy of 10 and we used 10% of our brain computing power. That is still much much better than the total computational power of all electronic devices. Is it possible to harness this computing power of our human brains for the benefit of all life on this planet ? how ? think ?

The next big question is how do we connect us all using existing technology such as the internet, mobile connected devices e.t.c I believe the Internet is humanity’s biggest invention, and If we could somehow figure this out, it would be humanity’s second biggest invention. How do we architect such a system and ensure that its open and fair to all ? How do we ensure that everyone participates and does their parts ? How do we setup a reward system ? how do we harness the knowledge and computing power so that we could eradicate all poverty, have a great quality of life for everyone, have a sustainable future, remove borders and hatred between nature’s best invention (humans) and form a complete map of human knowledge and continually keep on pushing the edges of reality to innovate at the maximum rate possible. The biggest challenge for our species remains “can we send ourselves into the outer-space and conquer other inhabitable planets and make them habitable”. We’ve spent far too much time fighting within ourselves. As the most intelligent species, we are sometimes the most stupid as well.

Knowledge leads to Happiness

In the history of the world, from the ancient asian civilizations, middle east, greek, romans, european, british, USA, USSR e.t.c All of them took the lead of ruling the world when they were in serious pursuit of knowledge and harnessing the knowledge for power. The real problem of poverty in africa is that intellect is not valued there. I was born and raised in kenya. A huge population of africa does not have access to education, if it does then very little work hard to understand the problem of education and accelerate it. Very little think about the great ideas of future and problem solving. Everyone likes to state the problem of politics e.t.c But solving it ? most responses are “I don’t think  we’re that smart”.

In the history of humanity, whoever had the best universities, best entrepreneur programs and an open way for this guys to convert ideas to reality and harness power ruled the world. Whoever had the strong urge of working together and pushing the limits of reality, made it come true. Everyone somehow assumes that its the government’s responsibility to make things come together, but how can we rely on our governments whose core purpose is sometimes to bash the opposition. I would like to propose to the australian government to draft out the current big social & economic problems, put it on the internet, reward and hire anyone who wishes to solve this problems. Make this process as transparent and open as possible to accelerate its rate.

Simply Complexity

Stephen Wolfram Alpha’s book “A new kind of science“, and many others have very much outlined that much complex things are usually built by connecting little things and making them work together via “specialize and exchange” as noted in the TED.com talk “when ideas have sex“. Right now I am in deep thoughts of how could I create a mobile/web app that would make ideas horny and make them have sex as much as possible and produce baby ideas who could then battle on the mammoth problems of today’s world. Anyone wanna help ?