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> Only once you know for a fact that a better solution is possible can you actually think of that solution This section reminded me of something a friend posit
by ketralnis 10y ago
> Only once you know for a fact that a better solution is possible can you actually think of that solution
This section reminded me of something a friend posited about space travel.
There are some inventions that just being exposed to the idea of them is enough to invent them. For instance, it seems that cultures that encounter others that have written language fairly quickly invent their own, even without knowledge of how the others work. The Cherokee syllabary was invented by an illiterate silversmith in the 1820s after he saw other people communicating via paper and knew that they represented a way to transmit information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Sequoyah_and_Cherokee_literacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Sequoyah_and_Cherokee...). The writing system that he invented was a syllabary, not an alphabet like the people he'd been observing or a logographic system like some other Native American languages. Having a writing system is a contagious idea all its own and knowing that they exist is sufficient to invent one.
It may be that efficient space travel is one of these inventions: just seeing someone else do it may be enough to invent it ourselves. I don't mean in the sense that we may observe details that give us hints as to how it works (though that's probably also true), I mean in the way that the article says "If nobody had gotten to the score of 180 before me, I couldn’t have thought of any faster way of solving this puzzle. Without that piece of information, the brain just comes up with reasons why the score is already optimal". Simply observing working space travel may be enough for us to invent it ourselves. We may even invent a system entirely unlike the one we observed.
- Frqy3 10y agoThe idea of using a fake result to break a paradigm has been used in a number of science fiction stories. I believe that the earliest is "Noise Level" (1952) by Raymond F. Jones, though the idea originated with John W. Campbell [0]. I first came across this concept in Robert Silverberg's "Double Dare" (1956) [1]. [0] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/09/28/astounding-stories-18-noise-level/ https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/09/28/astounding-storie... [1] https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-11/Galaxy_1956_11#page/n73/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-11/Galaxy_195...
- toolslive 10y agoIt has been used in reality as well. The Manhattan project is a well known example, where the US military lied to the scientists telling them the Germans were ahead in the game.
- legulere 10y agoSo basically an egg of Columbus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus And even in computer science you have that kind of inequality of difficulty of problem and solution: NP is the class of problems in which solutions can be checked if they are correct in polinomial time.
- MereInterest 10y agoSomething a bit stronger than the Egg of Columbus, I think. With the Egg, anybody can do it once they see how it is done. Here, anybody can do it once they see that it can be done.
- bobcostas55 10y ago>The writing system that he invented was a syllabary, not an alphabet like the people he'd been observing or a logographic system like some other Native American languages. For some reason, the alphabet seems to be extremely difficult to invent. IIRC it only happened once, with the Jews laying down the foundations and then the Greeks actually taking it all the way with vowels (I shudder to think what the world would look like if the Bronze Age collapse hadn't wiped out literacy in Greece). OTOH syllabaries/logographic systems have been invented independently a _lot_ of times all over the world.
- talideon 10y agoIt was the Phoenicians who invented alphabetic writing (well, actually an abjad), not the Israelites, who, as with the Greeks, borrowed and adapted the Phoenician script.
- hga 10y agoFor some reason, the alphabet seems to be extremely difficult to invent. You might be right, although the one known invention of it spread around pretty well, seeing as the Phoenicians primarily got around by sea. And I'm not sure it's always needed: while I'm not familiar with Cherokee, to the extent I understand Japanese, at the lowest levels it's encoded as a syllabary because that's the way their language works, and the ideographs they borrowed from China known as kanji in part help to distinguish between the many homonyms that are inherent in such a language, with the relatively few exceptions to strict use of syllables either easily encoded or a matter of spoken dialect.
- uberstuber 10y agoJapanese was first written in kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), with the syllabaries created hundreds of years later. Though you could say modern Japanese is encoded as a syllabary.
- Tarean 10y agoDo you happen to know how japanese input methods generally work? I have seen chinese and japanese steno machines before, e.g. chorded strokes that cover one or more sillables. That takes specific hardware and a bunch of training, though, so I'd guess it isn't the primary one.