More CS Counsel

Continuing along the same vein, here are some words from Manuel Blum of Carnegie Mellon University:

...Finite Automata can add but not multiply.
Turing Machines can compute any computable function.
Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata.
Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that 
the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil.
Think about it. 
It tells you something about the power of writing.
Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton.
With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

And here, have some more:

Brains are muscles.
They grow strong with exercise. 
And even if they're strong, they grow weak without it.

Yum, this is tasty stuff...

Whatever you do, you got to like doing it.... 
You got to like it so much that you're willing to think about it, work on it, long after everyone else has moved on.


THE PhD: DEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.

There's a wonderful quote from ANATOLE FRANCE:
"A University Student"
-- and this is especially true for a PhD Student --
"should know something about everything
and everything about something."

You know the jokes about PhD's...
A PhD knows more and more about less and less
until he knows everything about nothing.

Well now I am just bordering on copyright infringement:

When working on proving some statement S true, 
you should spend at least some time trying to prove it false.
Even if it's true, trying to prove it false can give insight.
And in any case, too often, our intuition is dead wrong.


There is yet another sense in which, when working on a hard problem, you may find that the answer is NOT what you expected. 
You may be looking for a YES or a NO; it may be something else.

Then he talks a bit about the P=NP problem, which I wish I had a better handle of in my mind but unfortunately took Theory of Computation during a semester when the force of earth's gravity spontaneously doubled.  But actually, there's nothing stopping me from researching it further as soon as I finish with my undergraduate degree.  When you listen to researchers talk, you can tell that to them there are no limits when you want to study something: the only thing holding you back is your own motivation or lack thereof.

Here's a poem that he wrote, called Blind Spots:

All men have Blind Spots in their eyes,
That manufacture visions of their vale.
And shape that void where light's unregistered,
With bold-faced unrepentant tales.

What other blind spots shape our minds and thoughts?
What other tales do won'dring minds unfurl
To woo us unbeguiled we would believe
To strange and nonexistent worlds?

He ends with another poem (although I suppose it is a mixture of poetry and prose) of his, of which I include the final stanza:

One does not have to be brilliant, a genius, to be special.
To do something better than anyone/everyone else. To be
UNMATCHED,
One has only to choose an END 
any END 
that MATTERS 
that INSPIRES 
YOU 
And then DO IT.

Overall I am impressed with this man's research and thoughts, and I greatly appreciate his willingness to share so much of it and so openly.  I hope to return to his site to learn more about consciousness and complexity and anything else that's worthwhile.  He seems like quite the interesting fellow, considering that he's a jewish-born Venezuelan computer scientist who now lives in America and won the 1995 Turing award.

While skimming through the Research Goals paper from Microsoft's Jim Gray I came across a mentioning of the Turing Tar Pit: "where everything is possible but nothing is easy".  This seems like it has some valuable parts as well, although I would probably revisit it just to skim for the main ideas.