Juxtaposition!

A signboard in Pind Sultani, Attock that reads like this:

ڈیکوریشن سنٹر

 قبرستان کی چادریں و شادی کا سامان دستیاب ہے

"Decorating center
Graveyard sheets and wedding paraphernalia are available."

All in one place!

Spring and hope

     Spring rains are here. Cool rain water continues to seep through soil to nurture the roots of plants. Deciduous trees and bushes have woken up from their deep winter slumber. New sprouts and flowers are adorning the countryside. There is a look of clean washed atmosphere and surroundings that suggests as if world is being created anew. Every spring gives us a message that nature has not abounded us. Hope still resides behind the clouds.

Image credit: Subhani, Dania

The Purple Thread

Epictetus was a second century Greek philosopher. He considered philosophy as a way of life rather than an academic matter. According to him, human sufferings arise when we try to control what is beyond our power and ignore what is within our reach. In one of his famous sayings, he compared people who fit in to the white threads of a dress. Such people are virtually indistinguishable from one another. He wanted to be a purple thread – “that small and shining part which makes the rest seem fair and beautiful”. “Why then”, he asks, “do you want me to be like the many? And if I do, how would I still remain purple?”

So which is better? Being peculiar purple or a predictable pale? I think that everyone should try to achieve a level of excellence in his or her favorite pursuit. Being different from the norm is good as life’s splendor comes from its diversity. Besides purple is one of my favorite colors.

1,000 Exoplanets

How little do we know about the place we live in; our universe. Just 400 years ago, Galileo was trying to prove that earth was not the center of the universe. His ideas took some time to sink in but then sun took the central place for the next couple of hundred years. Less than a hundred years ago, first galaxies were confirmed. At first, these were dubbed as island universes. First planets outside our solar system were discovered in 1992.  The verified list now numbers more than 1,000 such exoplanets. And this is just the beginning as by one estimate earth like planets might add up to billions in just our own galaxy. There may be more than one habitable planet per person alive today on earth. What other wonders exist out there, one can only imagine.

Our universe is huge and distances between stars are mind-boggling. Even a trip to a nearby star system may take generations to complete by our current technology. But this would be like talking about jet engines in the age of sailing ships. New sources of power and propulsion would be harnessed, new technologies would be conceived.

All of our philosophies and beliefs have roots in an era when earth was solidly considered as the center of universe. This new knowledge needs some time to become the part of human psyche. When that happens, new philosophies and belief systems might emerge to explain life, the universe and everything. 

A new era of wonder is around the corner. Stars are waiting for us and the age of humans has just begun.

Image credit : http://phl.upr.edu/

Arimaa – the human, computer standoff

When chess master Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM computer Deep Blue in 1997, AI programmer Omar Syed felt that it was not fair. He wanted a simple board game in which humans were at a clear advantage against computers. He also wanted to play it with his four year old son Aamir. Thus arimaa was born. It can be played on a standard chess board. Normal chess pieces of pawn, bishop, rook, knight, queen and king are replaced by or renamed as rabbits, cats, dogs, horses, camel and an elephant. This was unquestionably very entertaining for little Aamir (Infarct, arimaa is Aamir spelled backwards with an additional ‘a’ at the start).

Basic concept of the game is quite simple. The aim is to move rabbits to the end line of the board or to capture all enemy rabbits. But complexity of the game comes from the fact that its starting positions are not fixed. There are estimated 64 million ways to open a game. Similarly, the average possible moves are 500 times higher than that of a chess game. This branching factor makes it very difficult for computers. Since 2004, there is an Arimaa challenge in which human and computer programs compete for a 10,000 dollars prize. So far, humans have won the championship every single year. But it is predicted that by the year 2020, computers will have enough processing power to start beating human players. What will happen then? It is possible that another artificial intelligence expert would come up with something new to test the wits of machines. The standoff might continue into the future.

One might say that this is actually not a battle between human and computers at all. In reality, this is just one kind of human intelligence versus a different sort of human brainpower. A chess or arimaa mastermind is competing against carefully crafted human algorithms that are being run on human designed circuits. That is certainly a valid point, until humans give enough logic and processing power to computer that they become conscious.

Image credit: http://www.arimaa.com