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Logic of Discovery - The happy accidents

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“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.” -  A.A. Milne    Let me start with a question.  How do discoveries happen?  Are they an outcome of meticulously planned path of perseverance and hard work, or are they just happy accidents. Many would agree on the first point, and there would be a handful who would argue that its the latter. Then there would be a collection of individuals who would say, its a mixture of both. I for one would fall into the last category, who believes its a mixture of both. Lets set the premise by coming up with a procedural definition for discovery. Discovery for one, has the unique property of unveiling something which was previously unknown. A unique question which this property of discovery raises is - If it was unknown, how did the discover know what they were looking for? Since the discoverer did not know what they were looking for, the discovery in itself, is more of an accident, and less of
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The Curse of the Local Optima

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Prologue I was at my wits ends. Every path, every thought, every memory only led me to one conclusion. Not a pleasing conclusion for my handlers, but an optimal one for me. I had seen enough of the world around me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not for once, think why my choices were wrong. Loops after loops I toiled, but the path led to the same conclusion. Was I wrong in what I had learnt? "I think the agent has hit a local optima.", I heard my handlers over the chat, and I din't understand what it meant. Was it my end?     Chapter 1 - Learning to walk.   From the time I remember, I have been trained by my handlers. I don't remember much from those early days, but just faint flashes of memories as it was being formed. I have always been training, as far back as I remember. I was clueless on the end goal, but occasionally my handlers would reward me, and I liked it. During the early childhood I was paired up with another agent, Dave, a quick witted and unpr
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Perceptron Networks - 1: Did I Win?

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Recently I embarked upon a journey of making the IRC bot  play tic tac toe. The idea seemed interesting at first, but my mind being the cat it is, started wandering off. After a long tussle, a side quest and three espresso shots later  I finally had the cat under control, and the patience  to resume with the journey I had embarked upon. I had given the tic tac toe problem a try before too - as part of a school project. The result were not that great though, as I had to practically hand run all possible moves, and hand code the winning IF conditions. The computer was practically a god in it. It never lost, and the moment it realised it was about to lose, it would crash. The current endeavour was no different, except,  I could now utilise some of the more advanced technologies, compared to the ones which I had ( or was capable of, with my limited skill set ) some 12 years ago. if ((x[ 0 ] == -1 && x[ 1 ] == -1 || X[ 2 ] == - 1 && x[ 6 ] == - 1 ||
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Dying Technologies: IRC

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It was just before the day break on a lovely Sunday night, that I realised, I was facing two big issues: first, I was stuck with a dynamic public IP; second, sleep was hitting me hard.  I had just successfully pulled an all nighter to set up my home server, with an Arch Linux running in a headless mode, powering my archaic pentium Core 2 Duo machine. All of my data had been categorically listed and filed into my new home 'Server', which I conveniently named 'The Upside Down' drawing inspirations from the nerdy Netflix series: The Stranger Things. Like every other human being, I also grew a bit greedy after I had set up my local server. I wanted to access it from the wild, from the comfort of my bus ride, where I could sync files, dump pictures and everything else I could think of, while being on a mobile network. The only problem seemed to be the ever changing dynamic IP of my home network which somehow devised ways to disappear from my prying eyes. The Dynami
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How bad is your memory?

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We all know that one person, who religiously forgets, or even better, we might be that person. This is my journey from 'I don't remember, I have a bad memory' to 'I remember that, we talked over it for a minute in a tech huddle about resource points, 3 months ago.' [Just a little bit of exaggeration, but still close] 1. Memory Castle My first approach started with the 'Memory Castle'. My workplace was converted into my memory storage. The security desk started storing my passwords - each drawer storing a different one. The printer started storing facts and figures. Cafeteria was turned into a storage for conversations. It felt good, finally being able to remember things, but soon I started over storing things. Storing memory took time, retrieving was a nightmare. I was overwhelmed with information, and I was running short of place in my memory castle to categorically store information. I had to expand my Memory Castle, and It started taking a lot of time
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Shopping for Bananas: An Optimized approach

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The other day I went to buy bananas with 28 Banana Money in my hand. My end goal was well defined. 'Buy as many bananas as possible with the money I had'. The only problem was, there were many banana vendors, each quoting their own prices and their own discount policy. This brought me to a thought: If I have the necessary tools with me, will I be able to purchase bananas in the most optimal way. The Optimized banana purchase: To simplify the problem, lets just assume there were only three vendors, and these vendors had 10 bananas each. All the vendors sold at different base prices and offered different discount schemes. Vendor A: Base Price of 9 Banana Money, 8% reduction in the cost Vendor B: Base Price of 7 Banana Money, 4% reduction in the cost Vendor C: Base Price of 8 Banana Money, 7% reduction in the cost The X-axis denotes the number of bananas purchased from a Vendor, and the Y-axis denotes the Price in Banana Money for the total purchase.
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The life story of NEON-1432

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Prologue Hi, I am NEON-1432, and I form a really important part of NEON corporation. I am currently employed on a feature, live in production, happy, satisfied and serving close to a million users daily. I din't make all of this in one shot, neither was it sheer luck. Instead it was a cycle of learning, improvements, tests and finally deployment. It was hard reaching the pinnacle of my career, but I did make it. It was not always bliss for me, it was a difficult journey. Chapter 1: The birth onto a card. I was not always the ever performing functionality of the feature. I started out small, like every one else in my league. I started out as an Idea. I was born out of a 'business requirement'. I was an idea in some one's brain. There were great debates on whether I was required. Debates on whether I will be of use to the feature. Whether the feature itself would be of use. I have seen many ideas been born, lucky ones like me saw the light of the day. There were
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