Resplendence

I am.

ikulkarni — Sun, 08 May 2011 20:34:49 +0000

I am not the words you are reading, I am not the ink on this paper. Nor the lit or unlit pixels on a screen. I am not an existence, nor am I a representation. I am neither English, nor a particular order of symbols in Latin alphabet. I am the answer to “Am I a question?”. I am the thought in your mind, do not mistake me for the arrangement of neurons or their firing, I am not that. I am those little sparks of understanding that exist only between the the points of time when your eyes are busy capturing these words and your mind is busy parsing them. I am the comprehension that comes from abstracting away all details while the assimilated words and notions become ideas, and ideas become thoughts. I am that blaze ignited when the thoughts that refer to themselves spawn, as the sequence of these words end.

On New Year, Math Dept. and Other related Stuff

ikulkarni — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:43:08 +0000

It has been some time since I wrote here and I regret that I have begun multiple posts with this statement. I had planned to put some interesting stuff from summer here, but then felt it was too trivial to grab your attention (look how reader-dedicated I am, either that or I am just too lazy or head weighted to share all my thoughts here).

Summer was fun, really hot and everything, but mostly I was in lab and used to work for long hours. With no one around to ask how many hours I actually worked it did not seem like ‘work’ but more like living in the lab itslef. Made some interesting progress in my project and my thesis, but basically enjoyed roaming on empty campus pretending to myself that I owned the place. Summer has ended and new year has brought hordes of new students to the campus, reminds me of last year (on a side note the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes horde also as ‘..subdivision of Asian nomads’ .. hits the point uncomfortably close to the mark ). The passages, corridors and streets in the campus are throbbing with new students trying to find a route to a class. Today I saw that in DBH, the door to the passage leading to copier machine room and exit has a note, ”This door does not lead to any class room, Please see the directory behind you”, I silently chuckled to myself, because I remember last year at around this time, I was looking for a class and had walked into that very passage.

The Fall has come, but heat does not seem to be receding, I enjoy the weather though, I am running on treadmill every alternate evening until the shirt is soaking wet all over. It is new quarter and it looks like I will be working on something completely new this time, let’s see how it goes, feeling apprehensive, intimidated and hopeful all at the same time. Will post more about it if it goes well, if it does not I will pretend I never attempted it (read some ‘motivational line’ to this effect too). This time, though, it seems I am having serious trouble in taking my courses, which brings me to the classes I am attempting right now. So Enter Mathematics Department.

I attempted three classes in Math department in a day and at the end of 150 minutes, I am convinced that Mathematicians and rest Engineers/Scientists are different species from each other. Humans and squirrels have more in common than an Engineer and a Mathematician. They are some wonderful folk, they have this awesome theory about every single thing, they have this superb level of abstraction, but somehow they seems unfettered from such things as “need to have a footing in reality”, their levels of abstractions are so far from anything you or me (assuming you are not a mathematician) are usually accustomed to, that every once in a while we feel like pausing and raising our hands and asking the Professor politely “No offence, but what’s the point of what you have been talking since last 20 minutes?”. No I am not saying what they do is pointless, I am just saying that they have this extremely rigorous way of stating every point that you usually lose the idea of where or what you started. Reminds me of this comic from XKCD.

I attended Manifolds and Topology class, Stochastic Processes class and Probability models class , by the end of each I was so marinated in dozens of pages long definitions, corollaries and properties and sub-properties that recalling what all went on in the class was almost like a physical agony. Another point I felt after the class was these people have serious liking for the Greek letters and Gothic fonts and an Aversion for normal letters from English alphabet. “π-stable” ? “ζ²spaces”? Seriously? How about calling it ‘stable’ because we are not talking about any other kind of stability right now. Replacing that gothic style Greek letter with superscript with a simple line ‘space of all elements of power set, call it Z’ and if you don’t like it so long how about “Z = power set(‘some set’)” ? No, if it can be typed in normal text editor, we ain’t touchin’ it, what’s geekiness without some LATEX typesetting being absolutely essential in what we write?

Next point that is something I think everyone knows about mathematicians: they spend immense amounts of time and derive infinite pleasure from proving the obvious, yes I understand the proof itself is not ‘obvious’, but implications are and also, why do you need to be so uptight (=rigorous) about proving it from scratch even when the actual implication of such a proof is not a part of anything I am learning in next3 months? Lastly they hate Social Science department! Something came up in one of the classes and someone cracked quite an insulting joke (I will not quote the joke itself) about Social Science department and people actually laughed instead of giving him a dirty look, I found it quite strange.

Oh well, enough whining about Math dept., and seeing that I might actually take one of those courses I need to STFU and get studying, all in all, the first ‘exposure’ to alien race was a nice experience, let us see how far it goes..

So that is all for right now, until next time (when I need to whine about a different department, may be),

Adios!

On Dimensions

ikulkarni — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:57:11 +0000

Blog-3, I think.

My grandmom used to say that God has given us two eyes and one mouth because He wants us to observe twice as much as we express. When I studied about depth awareness in vision, I felt God gave us two eyes because he gave us 3 spatial dimensions to explore. Going further, we know that time is 4th dimension. So did God give us Neo Cortex to explore future (read this paper which says Neo Cortex is responsible for sequence prediction in brain) ? Going even further, we know that probability is possibly the 5th dimension, (check this video) . So did God give us the concept of insurance policies to explore this possibility? Wait.. it wasn’t God who gave us that!!

LOL!

On Self Awareness

ikulkarni — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:30:26 +0000

Bloglet-2

I am learning MATLAB, checking out the I/O for files, as an example I read a the program’s file itself and modified a few bytes and … then I suddenly stopped, and deleted the entire program file and shut down the computer, for I realized this is the first step to the program’s self awareness, it could turn into another ‘skynet’ or ‘deux machina’ and wipe out entire humanity! I breathed a sigh of relief, another great danger averted!

PS: inspiration for this crazy bloglet comes from “self describing tables” in data management!

On Language Switching

ikulkarni — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:06:07 +0000

Pre-Pre-Script: In contrast to my normal blogging habits, I am planning to write small blog entries like this one, between classes and call them Bloglets.

Pre-Script: I love switching between languages often, that’s why I am a fan of native languages (no, not like Kannada) native languages used in Java for ex., I like witching between English/Hindi/Kannada/Programming/Math, if someone gave me one cent every time I switched languages I would be a millionaire by now. This bloglet is one such language-context-switched entry, with inter-language puns!

Many ‘big people’ keep telling us to have steadfast aims in life. But I feel Life is monotonous (see, here I switched from English to Math, by ‘monotonous’ I don’t mean boring, but its mathematical meaning, as in ‘monotonously increasing/decreasing functions’). Life has few predictable points of inflection and they can be derived quite easily (again!). So it is enough to make greedy decisions (again, I do not mean the Ayn Rand ‘greedy’, I mean the greedy as in greedy algorithms, ones in which you make local decisions without a global aim) and be sure that if most of those greedy decisions go right, you are bound to end up in neighborhood of global maxima/minima as you require.

post script: naah, I am not adding a post script and a pre-script, this is just for effects!

On Reality

ikulkarni — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:23:00 +0000

The famous words by Morphius in Matrix : “What is Real?” I was thinking about that, (haven’t we all at one point in time?) when I was reading some topic in AI, I pondered it and when I gave it the thought I could spare at the moment, I changed my status message to “What is, is not what it is, what it is not, is also not what it is” some complemented me(my mom was first) but most others asked “what does it even mean?”, this

Imagine a point, now this point has no awareness of itself. Why? Because it does not even have an existence, now you’re wondering what I am even talking about, but remember a point does not have dimensions, and what does not have dimensions, does not exist as, at least not as matter or any form of interaction ( the slightest disturbance by the hypothetical gravitational waves also causes a change in dimensions of object matter) , so a truly zero dimensional object is only an imagination (which it truly is, because this paragraph began with the word “imagine..” ). So now imagine a Line, now I claim a line does not exist either, as geometrically speaking, a line is just a two dimensional a set of infinitely many points. Going further, nor does a plane exist (which contains infinite-squared number of points ;-P, read about cantor sets ) . But let’s take just one more step further, and make a 3-D space, is it hard to imagine it? I hope not, the world we perceive is three dimensional, of course. So something happened here that transformed the in-existence of two dimensions into existence by just adding a dimension (that which had not happened last two times) into, turning it into some easily perceivable “world” around us. I believe you will not find it difficult now to extrapolate to fourth dimension, let’s call it time.This addition of a fourth dimension added a temporal aspect to reality, a “life” if you will. ( Digressing a bit, have you wondered why we call it “animation”? ‘Animate’ is to ‘bring to life’ (as we use “an inanimate rock”), and some how the cartoon on the Sunday paper is not ‘animation’, but the one that runs on television is, because it ‘moves’, changes in times, thus even linguistically speaking, adding the time dimension ‘brings life’ ). So far so good, from a point that did not exist to line which had one extra dimension and also did not exist to time, down to fourth dimension which adds “life”. Now add a dimension more, physicists have called it many things, including “probability”. A physicist, Gerard ‘t Hooft called it the space-time fabric.

But that is beside the point, as the point is, if there exists an intelligence, a self aware entity in this 5th dimension, will it call the world we perceive, inanimate? Do we want to call it inanimate, or call it something that exists only as imagination ? Well some do, there has always been a school of philosophy (and physics and mathematics and theology and drug addiction) that claims that the world is not real but only exists in our imagination, read about Rene des Cartes’ philosophy(for the benefit of those who didn’t know: he claimed “I think, therefore I am”) ? He associated the existence to thought, though I think he did not mention what he meant by “think”, which is topic unto itself. It might be funny if we note that we call the system of dimensional measurement the “cartesian” system. A system of representation of an entity in n-dimensions with a vector with n values.

We have digressed enough, to re-iterate my question, is existence a perception in finite dimension? How about interpolation this time? The idea of watching things in dimensions that have value between 2 and 3 or 1 and 2? I can’t help but mention Cauchy’s Snowflake and other fractals here. Do they exist or is it a simple mathematical manipulation to represent something that cannot be explained otherwise? Let’s, for a moment think they are the latter. If they are only a mathematical convenience, then why are any of the dimensions not a just a mathematical convenience?

Hmm, our discussion till here has left far too many lose threads in the form of unanswered questions, the answers to which are both inconclusive and arguably unattainable. There is a very easy avenue out of this, I feel, and that is to decouple the idea of existence from idea of dimensions, and instead associate reality with conscious assimilation of the world . Here I chose these words that I have, for a reason: I want to steer clear of the “reality is perception, and perception is reality” ideology, but retain in essence the the decoupling of physical world as we see it, from what we call real. Let’s delve a bit further on what I meant by “conscious assimilation the world”.

You must have seen many 3D- movies, but you “know” they are not really in 3 dimensions, but an illusion that causes them to display an apparent “depth”. What gave you this knowledge is your understanding of the world that is not simply what your sensory percepts input (this lack of one-to-one correspondence motivates the decoupling). We know that our picture of reality is somehow more, a step further in what we understand, in my word: “assimilate” the world( In his book “On Intelligence” James Glieck gives a very elaborate and interesting view on this) So reality, in my opinion is that abstract representation, that gives meaning independent of percepts, and also at times independent of the subject matter in front of us. Also it is surely not “mind”: mind is more akin to an “algorithm” and possibly a meta algorithm, but it is not understanding in itself, we can go as far as to say the output of this meta- or meta-meta-algorithm, which traverses our various levels of consciousness, giving a “depth” to the small dimensional world fed to it by our percepts, and this is makes the “it” around us that i refereed to in my status message that day. The system of thought, the ethereal flow of that understanding up and down our hierarchical consciousness is what makes the world around us, it gives it dimensions, it gives us glimpse into what “is”.

When I start a blog I always wish to keep it purely in one genre, but I always end up mixing and it is at this point that I must talk about the Hindu philosophy. This philosophy has always been assaulted upon for being vague, for not “giving out” what it wants to say, consider for example what Ayn Rand says about Indian philosophy, though I do not remember the exact text now, I remember that she was against the idea of describing God as what He is not, rather than describing in precise words what he is, she called it a flaw in logic. I do not know whether Miss Rand knew about Boolean algebra, but contra-positive also has the same truth value as implication. By describing what it is not, the philosophy is deliberately blurring the idea, it is telling you to stop searching in avenues that are fruitless, it’s like NP completeness, either you go head long into attacking the problem of P=NP, or you just leave the avenue and search the greener pasture. Describing God, I think is something similar. Here’s how: from what I wrote in most part of this blog, reality is neither precept, nor simply a thought, nor is it conjuncture weaved to explain the vast complex world around us. It is a higher level assimilation that cannot be framed in any particular analogy, or described in temporal dimensions.

Hindu philosophy has always equated many deep concepts, in most of our texts, words “It”, “truth”, “Real”,”Reality”, “Existence”, “Universe” are all synonyms to the generalized word “God”, so describing the “reality” as an abstracted assimilation the way i described is not a flaw in philosophy, but a contra-positive.

As a parting thought think of what this self referential sentence means: “As you are reading me, I am just a bunch of state changes in the configurations of the neurons of your brain”

Here I must conclude. I know this has been a long read and the material has spread across many subjects not all of which may be understandable to everyone. But it has been my effort to keep it general, and therefore please do not gauge my knowledge either in Math or philosophy by this blog. And for the curious: I was reading “Model Based Agents” in AI when this blog started brewing in my head.

Thanks for reading,

Adios!

Transformation

ikulkarni — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:38:59 +0000

This blog is about a very important aspect of mathematics, in fact so important that we apply this concept in our life consistently. It is about “transformation”, in this case, viewing the life as something else to make certain emancipating conclusions.

My university required me to submit my degree certificate, so my parents obtained them from my previous university and couriered them to me, which arrived yesterday. Th last day for that submission being only 3 days away I was pretty tensed, so I hurried over and submitted them, after finishing the formalities I went to study center and was securely packing the degree certificate, along with my transcripts (which listed all my marks from first to last semester), when I read that certificate ” ..he has been declared eligible to the award of Bachelor of Engineering degree in … “, a sense of exhilaration coursed through me reading that. In the rush of the life we so often forget what path we have tread to come here, how eventful that path has been.

Now I was rooted, I re-read all my marks cards, and certificates from tenth standard till final semester, sure these are not the most impressive marks one can see, but they were mine and those bunch of numbers were actually life buoys in the nearly forgotten of sea of time that lies behind me. To a prospective employer or someone similar they are “metrics” to gauge me, but for me they are the quintessence of a small struggles, battles at times, in the past, some won, some nearly lost, but gory all. I saw the pathetic marks I had obtained in Mu-p, I remembered the struggle I had put up to pass that subject and yet maintain FCD. When I saw the tenth marks card, I was filled with memories of preparation, of reading History on top of Arun’s house terrace (I still get nightmare in which one day I wake up and realize that day is Social Studies exam and I have not prepared at all or something similar). Then I saw the Chemistry marks in 12th, I was so reminded of Babuji’s classes and the pages from Physical Chemistry text.. All those were tense times, moments when those exams looked like insurmountable obstructions, they were moments of complete panic and near hysteria, now naught more that a speck in the past. When I sit to think of those exams, the severity of the moment comes back, not diminished only distanced, somehow dulled.

While mentioning this to a friend, Swathi, I came to a comparison of this phenomenon. Life, I feel, is like mountain climbing. There are moments when you come to face to face with a large boulders with flat faces, at the moment the boulder fills your vision, you find only the sheer rock in front of you and an abyss behind, you feel that nothing at all matters other than getting past that boulder, nothing is more important, and you give anything to get past it because you fear that nothing exists but this challenge, then struggle against the cold rock, bruise your limbs, you toil, you sweat and you bleed, nearly miss it and then, in one glorious moment you peak it, then the moment is past, you keep walking forgetting your terror of abyss and rock face, you forget the moment of exhilaration, you only watch the “present” because someone told you it’s a gift, and you struggle ahead forgetting that adrenaline of climb that terror, only paying attention to the path you’re walking on. . But at one point you stand, braze your feet and look back, those rocks and boulders and abysses, are still very much there, and when you can think, even the terror you felt becomes so real again, it course through your veins, teh you realize the moment has passed, that you have made it, you have surmounted it, the difficulty that seemed to overpower you behind that rock face is very much real but real only in your head, the rock itself is distanced, now a pebble in your vision. And in those moments when you stand and breathe and look back do you realize that no problem that threatens to over power you exists outside of your head, In that moment when you realize this, I think, you truly live.

This is the transformation that measures our life, the transformation from the terrified squealing climber behind the rock face to the man standing after having conquered it, realizing that yes the terror was real only as real as you made it in your head. It is not scaling the entire mountain, nor somehow making it to the top, but realizing this. The realization that there were many problems in the past and there will be more in the future, I believe, is the true emancipation of a soul.

Thanks for reading,

Here’s to Life,

Cheers!

Pattern Recognition

ikulkarni — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:24:31 +0000

When one is postulating correlations or causations extant in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist.

Jeff Walther

Yes, our brain is a very good patter recognition engine:

I recognized a pattern in my “Algorithm Design” textbook, by Kleinberg and Tardos:

(Chapter 8, NP and Computational Intractability, Section 8.3, 4th paragraph under “Problems and Algorithms)

last sentence of paragraph:

We say that A solves the problem X if for all strings s, we have A(s) = yes if and only if s∈X

On a similar note, I fund this pic somewhere on the web:

That’s all for the post, keep matching patterns,

Cheers!

Scope

ikulkarni — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:03:51 +0000

“The discussion of which is beyond the scope of this text” I read this line first in my 8th standard mathematics text. I wondered when I will actually come to the level where I will read those mysterious things that are beyond the scope of the book I was holding. I forgot what the text was discussing so I didn’t found out if I ever came to that level. And 10 or so years later here I was studying Applied Cryptography, and one sentence lashed at me again from a text: ” the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book ” Wow! I think even the best brains in this world, in mathematics in physics and in philosophy, also get stumped by this sentence every once in a while. As Socrates said “The more a man knows, the more he realizes how less he knows”. By the way,this can be mathematically accurate only if we consider that ”all that is to be known” as an infinite set, or simply that knowledge is free flowing ad infinitum to quote the opening of Ishaavashya Upanishad of Yajur Veda: “Poorrnamadah purnamidam, purnaat purnamudachyate purnasya purnaamadaya purnamevavashishyate” (This is Complete , this is Complete, from that Complete a if a Complete is extracted, a Complete remains, adding to that Complete leaves it as Complete (as before), shanti shanti shanti). I am sure Adi Shankarachrya, while writing this made sure to call it as just ‘Complete’ and nothing more, possibly to leave the lesser mortals like us to eternally contemplate what he was referring to by ‘Complete’, was it knowledge, the Brahman, the Truth, what was it that will ever drive man in pursuit of that which cannot be completely extracted?

PS: I did not intend to make this quick post philosophical, but well, here it did become one..

Vista Sucks

ikulkarni — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:18:56 +0000

Yes it does. Some people need to go tell M$ that some repeatative graphics for file copy and some Gaussian blur of background for windows title does not make an Operating System. In my opinion a basic (very basic) requirement of an Operating system is that - well, it I should be operational. Assisting me to interact with underlying machine and peripherals without much ado, precisely what Vista is abysmal in doing.

I bought my laptop from BestBuy close to my place in Irvine (the District). It’s a Dell Studio 1555, a decent system in terms of its configuration: 2.1GHz Intel Mobile Core2 Duo (T6500, Penryn Core, 32KB, 32KB, 2048×2 Caches), 4GB, Dual Channel, DDR2 RAM at 800MHZ, Mobile Intel Series 4 onboard graphics. I bought this system at 685$. And with it came VISTA! Home Premium 64-bit. My idea was to return this OS, I had read an elaborate post about how if you do not agree to the Licence Policy and contact MS and return the OS, you could get back the money. But I had also heard things about compatibility problem with University network and other stuff with Linux distros, so I resigned to using Windows Vista, this was my first first-hand experience with Vista (yeah, I am outdated)

So, where do I begin? Firstly I was annoyed that my 320GB HDD was partitioned into 2 drives, Two? That too, the split was 15GB recovery drive, and rest as OS drive, who does this? They want you to keep all your files in Windows specified folders – what are you the Big Brother of 2009? Independence aside, what will happen to all my files when I want to Install a new OS, or worse, what’ll happen if the OS needs restoring and all files do disappear?

I did some looking around and ‘shrunk’ the OS drive to push down its size to 160GB. “Shrink” ? More and more big-brother attitude – not letting the users know what’s really happening. then, that’s it, the dead end. No way to reduce it any further. And the space I left the sinister HDD partitions alone as there were more pressing matters around.

Those pressing matters were that of performance? I open the TaskManager and see that 1.5GB of my RAM is wasted when I am doing absolutely nothing, The OS needs as much RAM as was costing a 1000$ just 10 years ago? Why, to run repeatitive graphics in file copy dialogue boxes? About file copying: I was copying some music from a DVD (don’t ask), I guess there was a scratch on the disk, and it threw Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) error, and the the copying simply stalled for ever, so I closed the program and restarted all over again, this time it stalled at the same file and this time I let it be to see how long it’ll take to recover, well it didn’t for about twenty min, and then, even the whole system froze, forcing me to restart the machine, WOW!!

Another point about performance: the CPU usage was always up to 35%, MY, MY! Here’s a system that has two cores running at 2.1GHz clock and you need 35% usage to run explorer and no user application? I stopped the sidebar and stupid Dell Dock and the amount of freed memory and CPU was negligible in all cases, Lemme repeat: WOW!! At the same time, the Usage of the 160GB drive was close to 50GB, I can’t tireof saying this – WOW!!

I was programming an application in Java (JDK 1.6, NetBeans 6.7.1) and the application was some very basic application, and you know what – it was getting stuck. I was wondering if it had anything to do with my thread management (yes I am old school, I manage my threads with my own boolean semaphores instead of writing while (Thread.currentThread() == workingThread) ). I wanted to be absolutely sure on what i was writing, and one way to do it is see if the thread is getting enough CPU working time from OS, and a simple way to do this is to run the same thread with no work (here the animation work) and a simple long counter increment, and compare it with another thread running the work and the counter, if the numbers are comparable then JVM has enough cycles to split between thread if not , no. I saw that my threads have been managed well by me and JVM, and guess what I saw: my app is getting ridiculously low CPU share.. Well, understandable: the explorer or some other stupid thing is with priority from the OS is hogging all the cycles, what chance does my poor app stand?

These are definitely some major issues, that need addressing. . I am not the one to sit and whining about patheticity of the OS, I looked around a hundred pages and tried dozens of softwares that partition the HDD. Many reasons why I could not use any software was because: 1. They are not free software (and I am cheap) 2. They cant partition 64-bit OS 3. They work only if there is enough space to crunch the drive and so on.. After much looking around I found Partition Wizard Home Edition from here , which worked quite well. Next up, I got hold of Revo Uninstaller, uninstalled a hell lot of things, can you believe the lappy had programs whose sole purpose was to show one EULA? I got rid of such things. I also reduced the page file size to something like 1GB, now my C drive is sitting snug in 22.8GB space. I will make this a better system and the best way to do it is go here and install a copy of fedora 11;-)