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Has anyone considered that the roads are equally travelled precisely because every traveller chooses the less travelled path? Could the poem actually be a comm
by Grue3 11y ago
Has anyone considered that the roads are equally travelled precisely because every traveller chooses the less travelled path?
Could the poem actually be a commentary on load balancing?
- x5n1 11y agoBrilliant. A+ certification.
- sharkweek 11y agoI have literally never even remotely thought of this poem in such a way. Grue3, you have shined new light upon these words.
- Apocryphon 11y agoGame theory, perhaps?
- noonespecial 11y agoThat is exactly the sort of thing some pseudo-highbrow twit would have given me a 'D' for in high school after assuring me that "there are no wrong answers". I love it.
- davidw 11y agoI once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it. Sorry, but that's the way my brain is wired, and I was exasperated by the teacher going on about a bunch of stuff that to me seemed like you could just make it up as you go along. "Well, the boat symbolized her relationship with her father, and when the anchor broke, it meant that her affair with her uncle was doomed from the outset because the barnacles on the boat were symbolic of the calluses on his hands, because he was a factory worker, rather than one of the landed gentry..." or some horse shit like that. You can downvote me, but I won't apologize for loathing that kind of thing.
- jqm 11y agoYou are getting down-voted but I always had the same feelings. Lit teachers often read far far too much symbolism into the text. It is usually simply guesses or completely unfounded and stretched opinion far removed from what the author intended, and most usually a huge waste of everyone's time.
- travjones 11y agoI agree. Sometimes one can establish a degree to which his/her interpretation is correct by considering evidence (from the author's text) for and against his/her interpretation, but rarely are lit teachers (at least in my experience) this objective.
- jilopy 11y agoPick up a copy of "How to Read Literature Like A Professor" by Thomas C. Foster at your library. My AP Lit instructor had me read it almost a decade ago (after similar complaints) and it helped me enjoy required undergrad literature classes much more - gives a practical, fair insight into literary analysis.
- protomyth 11y agoThe best sendup of Lit teachers reading too much symbolism was in the movie "Back to School" and the Kurt Vonnegut scenes. Diane: Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut! [cut to Thornton's dorm suite] Thornton Melon: [on the phone] ... and another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the cheque!
- VikingCoder 11y agoIn what WAY does the author's use of the PRISON SYMBOLIZE the protagonist's struggle - AND how does this relate to our discussion of the uses of irony? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc
- jtr1 11y agoInteresting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it. Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?
- protomyth 11y agoI think my Dad had that "pseudo-highbrow twit" for a professor in college. Asking my Dad why the whale was white in Moby Dick gets a reaction like someone remembering being in a car accident. It also probably explains why he didn't seem surprised to be informed by my high school teacher that my 5-minute book report that stretched to 35-minutes on The Pearl had "too much energy" and "focused on the negative themes" a bit much. For my part, given the conditions of the school, I found the choice of books to be unfortunate.
- kenjackson 11y agoAlways reminds me of this Rodney Dangerfield movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jow5aO8mp3E
- lacker 11y agoI wish every programming concept was taught through a poem, or song, or music video.
- ggchappell 11y agoYes, rather like the checkout lines at the local grocery store. Perhaps we should change the last line of the poem to "And that has made everything the same."
- delinka 11y agoI was actually expecting the article author to make this very argument ... and it didn't happen.
- HenryTheHorse 11y agoThis is the kind of goofy USENET humor I dearly miss. Bravo, sir.
- logicallee 11y agoHe is saying "If everyone takes the less-travelled road, then to an average magnitude of sqrt(n) where n is the number of previous travelers, a rand()-based choice - which can skew the running total slightly - would be an equally effective load-balancing solution versus manually balancing the sides deterministically, while at the same time saving the time spent in examining roads to determine the current level of travel. However, sqrt(n) makes all the difference."
- smacktoward 11y agoTwo loads diverged into a rack, and I— I implemented a weight-based round-robin balancing algorithm, And that has made all the difference.
- kens 11y agoKnuth wrote a paper on toilet paper dispensers with two rolls, with the assumption that a user has a fixed probability of choosing the smaller roll. He then uses all sorts of crazy math to analyze how much paper will be left when the smaller roll is emptied. This method could be used to analyze the Frost poem situation if a traveler has probability p of choosing the path less taken. http://gi.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/teaching/2007summer/jclub/papers/toiletPaper.pdf http://gi.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/teaching/2007summer/jclub... P.S. I go with the regret interpretation of the poem. "I shall be telling this with a sigh" makes it pretty clear.
- xixi77 11y agoBut, is the constant probability assumption even reasonable? Seems like an experimental study is necessary. I wonder if it has in fact been already done.
- brightball 11y agoThis is easily the best comment I've ever read on Hacker News. Please grant a BSD license so I can be comfortable reusing it anywhere I like.
- scholia 11y agoMaybe. Or else it could be about Chaos theory, as in the famous "butterfly effect" (a very small difference in the beginning can make a very large difference in the end).
- jmiwhite 11y agoThe Road Round Robin-ed?
- eevilspock 11y agoWhile that's a possible interpretation, it clashes with reality, and as a realist if not a cynic, I doubt Frost would have had such a innocuous view of people and the choices they make. Do you yourself really think that many people "take the road less travelled"?
- plonh 11y agoMany people intentionally do the not-popular thing. Some of realize later, and tell ages hence, that the majority made the right choice, and that our renegade choice made all the difference in our lives.
- yongjik 11y ago...Also a cautionary tale for proper locking, because what would happen if k people arrived at the intersection at the same time and all chose the path that was less traveled then.
- gizmo686 11y agoLocking in this case is probably a pessimization. We do not really care if difference between the number of people who have taken each path exceeds 1, or even 100. What is important is that, over the long term, the wear on the two paths does not diverge significantly. In this case, after k people arrive and all choose path A, the next k-ish people who arrive will choose path B, and the roads will remain equally well traveled. The overhead of a temporary discrepancy between the paths is dwarfed by the overhead of locking. I have actually had occasion to remove locking, because the resulting behavior was correct enough to justify the improved performance.
- mbubb 11y agoThe poem is contradictory about that. Both appear equally travelled. The one chosen has a grassy patch up ahead. Its a great image of starting out on a journey/project and just seeing the first little bit of the path. There is no knowledge of the condition of the rest of the path. The 'perfectly logical' character of logical puzzles would stand in that fork forever but we because of intuition or impulse make a choice which we later imbue with meaning. I like this sentence from the article: "The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives."
- mbubb 11y agoI love the quip on loadbalancing. It is like that though really it is more like round-robin as the choice is arbitrary. We do not know about conjestion or trouble up ahead. In loadbalancing the choice is made by the system - in this case the 'request' choses the lb/path.