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You can learn the mechanics and electronics yourself. You have time, money for equipment and books, and all the background and maturity you need. If you find
by dkarl 16y ago
You can learn the mechanics and electronics yourself. You have time, money for equipment and books, and all the background and maturity you need. If you find that going it alone leads to frustration, pay a starving grad student $30 an hour to help you out once in a while. I don't say this knowing anything about mechanics and electronics; I just know that school will be too slow for you and won't actually help much. School is for people who need to prove (to themselves and others) that they aren't just dicking around. Since you've got a PhD and financial security, people are going to assume that whatever you're doing in your workshop, you aren't just wasting your time, and even if you are, you've earned the right.
Don't sweat the difference between Lisp and Python. Python interfaces to C and has large, mature, and popular scientific computing libraries. I would actually recommend learning Lisp (for the usual reasons) and using it as you pursue whatever CS learning you need, but don't be surprised if you end up using Python for practical work because of the libraries and the large community of people doing scientific computing.
- zatara 16y agoI consider CS the most important part of this project and the real open problem. I thought about doing this project in LISP, because dealing with custom-made devices will require code generation and lots of AI. I'll have to translate lots of surgical experience and rules of thumb into the code, so Python doesn't seem to be enough (or maybe I'm just unexperienced). Besides that, I really control all the environment so deployment is a non-issue. Does my rationalization makes sense?
- ableal 16y agoTo me, I'm sorry to say, no. From experience, I've become a believer in "Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics". I'd suggest sticking to Python, a clean and pleasant language that 'fits my brain', to solve the problems you do have, until you bump into something that needs more. If/when what you can get for Python (from constraint solvers to whatever) proves insufficient. Also, lookup "Beware of the Turing tar-pit". And see what Peter Norvig ( http://norvig.com http://norvig.com ) has to say. On the other hand, you may consider rule systems (see, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363680 ); but consider also how you'll debug and maintain them.
- dkarl 16y agoHonestly, it did not even cross my mind that you would need to do any sophisticated programming. I assumed that most of the challenge would be in mapping and mastering the problem domain: figuring out what problems you need to solve, researching existing solutions to each problem, finding code and adapting it for your needs, experimenting to see if the existing solutions work well for your particular problems, adapting them if necessary, and then wiring it all together in a simple way using a glue language. Lots of work and sophisticated AI stuff there (probably a few PhDs if you took it far enough) but no fancy programming. That seems to be the sad truth about real world problems: the programming is rarely as hard and interesting as all the other problems you will solve. On the other hand, Lisp is a lot of fun, and you shouldn't pass up any excuse to learn it ;-)