6 ms·
The Feynman Algorithm
- jeffcoat 16y ago> Write down the problem. > Think real hard. > Write down the solution. I had a college physics professor who called this "The Method of Applied Brilliance".
- stcredzero 16y agoHere's how I did my hardest take home exams in grad school: - Attempt to solve problem using tools learned in the course - Attempt to solve problem using "standard" tools - Fail at the above - Go to bed - Wake up, shower, eat breakfast I'd have the answers in the last step.
- boryas 16y agoFor this reason, take home exams are evil. Also, get rid of the fourth strategy
- stcredzero 16y agoI think the fourth is crucial.
- boryas 16y agoAfter a point, but I think a large part of getting a problem is committing maximal time and energy to solving it or "dying"
- chriseidhof 16y agoThere's research on intuition and the unconscious mind to back this up. Apparently, for a lot of problems the best way to solve it is by thinking very hard about it and then letting it go. Your unconscious mind will go on, especially when you're doing activities such as showering (which has little distractions), and all of a sudden you will have the solution. I use this technique all the time, if I can't think of a solution for a hard problem I'll just leave it and go for a run, take a shower or work an another problem. Unfortunately, I only have read a book from the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, which is unfortunately in Dutch, but I'm sure there are people here who will have some references in English.
- jsharpe 16y agoThe cool thing is that it's not even as facetious as it appears. "Writing down the problem" is a legitimate, and very useful, tool for problem solving, and one that is often skipped.
- nostrademons 16y agoAnother useful step is "Ask a friend for help." Not because they'll solve it, but because the act of reducing the problem to a complexity simple enough to be explained to another person often makes the solution obvious.
- sophacles 16y agoOn the other end, writing down the solution, is also a good tool. The number of times I thought I 'figured something out' by thinking real hard (in the shower or whatever) only to find problems during this final stage is large. It is very much the same thing as telling a fellow developer about a bug you can't solve, only to solve a trivial issue half way thru the explanation. The writing down or explanatory phase is quite important.
- todayiamme 16y agoMaybe Feynman was Feynman because he was willing to work at it longer and harder than other people around him. I remember reading once that he was about to have an operation to remove his tumor within a week and it wasn't certain that he would survive. The doctor in fact told him point blank that there was a chance that he could die. A friend came up to him with a physics problem and he spent the entire day and evening working at it. They failed and decided to call it intractable. So, Feynman goes home and later in the night he calls him up to say that he has a solution. That was a man a week away from near certain death. Is that something innate or someone with the sheer persistence and experience to bend things his way? I want to ask how many people who will be reading this would have done the same? I wouldn't have, and perhaps this is why Feynman was Feynman. P.S. - The article was awesome.
- chriseidhof 16y agoI think there was also part of him that just can't help but solving problems. He's spent so much time solving problems and became even better at it, but he was probably still extremely fascinated by his science and just couldn't help but solving this problem. I have noticed a similar thing, where if a cs problem is interesting enough, I just have to think about it, even when other interesting things are going on in the real world. I think it might be an (unhealthy?) fascination with a certain field.
- todayiamme 16y agoI read your stuff. Awesome. I want to be something like you as I grow up. :)
- arethuza 16y agoHaving read Feynman's books and descriptions of him in other places it seems to me he was supremely gifted but also willing to indulge his curiosity about seeming trivial things that is uncommon in professional scientists - the whole thing with spinning plates being a good example.
- todayiamme 16y ago
- RK 16y agoI don't know the context of the Gell-Mann quote, but having heard Gell-Mann talk about Feynman, it seems more likely to me that that is Gell-Mann's description of how Feynman imagined the Feynman algorithm.
- kragen 16y agoConcur. When I head Gell-Mann talk about Feynman (probably this was in 1994) he seemed to think he was about equally smart, but Feynman somehow had much better PR. Probably Feynman writing a series of books of stories about how smart he was had something to do with it.
- LaPingvino 16y agoMy way to execute this algorithm is to try to get as distant as possible to the problem in step 2, taking as much experience into account as possible, and then hap-hazardly zooming in. Or something like that. And it seems to work.
- Maro 16y agoA necessary precondition is to define a good problem. Speaking from experience, this is easily the hardest step for physicists. For example "What is dark energy?" or "Are there baby universes?" are not good problem definitions, but to my surprise "What is the radius of the proton?" is still a good problem definition today [1]. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/08/the-incredible-shrinking-proton-that-could-rattle-the-physics-world/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/08/the-inc...
- jey 16y agoThere's a hidden gem in this article, a link to an excellent talk by Gerry Sussman: http://www.archive.org/details/arsdigitacoll09 http://www.archive.org/details/arsdigitacoll09
- lkozma 16y agoThere's another "Feynman Algorithm" which someone mentions towards the end of the article: he said he kept a small number of problems constantly in the back of his mind and whenever he heard of a new trick or method, he tested it against his problems. I once wrote a blog post about whether the opposite method is effective: you keep your favorite tricks and techniques sharp and always look for new problems they might solve.
- Eliezer 16y agoI'm often frightened by how spontaneously my brain seems to come up with something, because it could just as easily stop doing that and I'd have no idea how to fix it. I once walked past a math book one of my friends had left open, glanced over, stopped, pointed to a formula, and said, "This is wrong." (Which it was.) I only did it that once, but it's the sort of anecdote you can tell for the rest of your life. And if my brain stopped doing that, I'd be screwed.
- csl 16y agoYou're lucky! I'll never get the same innate ability for problem solving, but what I'm hoping is that it's actually possible to train my brain towards such spontaneity. E.g., by spending time to solve a lot of challenging puzzles over a long period of time. It's like when you try to remember a shopping list by visualizing the items. After repeating the items enough times, you don't visualize the list anymore; you just know it.
- Wilduck 16y agoI remember in fifth grade we were learning to multiply 3 digit by 3 digit numbers. My teacher wrote two 3 digit numbers on the board and I immediately blurted out the answer. He looked down at his notes, and just looked back at me, I had been right. Like you, I've never had this experience again. It makes this feel true: http://xkcd.com/447/ http://xkcd.com/447/
- 10ren 16y ago"Writing down the problem" sounds trivial, but it's often the hard part. Once you understand the question, the answer is obvious (as a commenter said). I have to break down complex problems in order to come up with questions that I can understand. The really hard part is in finding the right way to break them down, because not all modularities and boundaries between them will help to solve the problem. But all of this properly forms part of Feynman's step one, of writing down the problem. I also often get a sense of what the answer should be - but it's very difficult to even begin to describe it in words, let alone define it clearly, and even harder to prove it is correct. Yet... it almost always is correct. This is properly in Feynman's steps two and three. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Picasso It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition we discover - Poincaré and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was - Douglas Adams
- keefe 16y agoI completely agree - I studied algorithms because of a fascination with general problem solving and this idea came up frequently with my advisor. I think problems occur at various levels of granularity and only those of a sufficiently fine grain are actually solvable in any real sense. I see it as breaking down the probability space of answers until a concrete solution emerges. Extremely high level problems are extremely easy to write down: 1. How can a ship travel faster than the speed of light? 2. How do I live to be 500 years old? 3. How do I make $1M? These problems have appropriately trivial sets of solutions: 3a. Steal it 3b. Make an advertising supported web app 3c. Make a freemium web app 3d. Make an iphone/ipad app 3e. Work hard and slowly invest 3f. Write a facebook app and so forth. Then it's a cycle of prepending "How do I" until a feasible solution appears. 3ai. install a virus that steals fractions of pennies from each transaction 3aii. rob a bank 3aiii. blackmail a rich guy 3aiv. atm muggings (some solutions are more feasible than others) 3av. hijack a truck full of computers 3avi. rebill scams from spamming morons 3avii. steal CC #s and on and on. At this level of granularity, sequential high level plans start to emerge. I realize these are very different than physics problems, but it's the same basic process of breaking down the solution space by writing it down from high level to concrete implementation problems to which insight/intuition can be applied.
- monos 16y agonot sure what the point of this is, but for hard problems (= you have no experience or it involves humans) that won't work. you can't know what the problem is until you tried a couple of solutions.
- bitwize 16y agoAttributed to Norbert Wiener: A student came to him with an incredibly difficult problem he couldn't solve. Wiener stared at the ceiling for about fifteen minutes, then wrote down the answer. The student said, "I'm sorry, Professor, but I didn't quite understand how you came up with that." Wiener stared at the ceiling again for fifteen minutes, and again wrote down the answer. The student said, "I'm sorry, Professor, but I still don't get it." Wiener, flustered, replied: "I've just shown you two different ways to solve this problem! What more do you want from me?"