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Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
- macrael 15y agoDefinitely read the appendix "Tools & Implementation". He expresses frustration with the current state of the art in building visualizations. My guess is that he is using his javascript library for "reactive documents" called Tangle http://worrydream.com/Tangle http://worrydream.com/Tangle for all the demos in this article. I'll just add that I really find this whole piece astounding and many levels above the majority of things I find on the internet.
- funkah 15y agoYes, "astounding" is the word.
- keithpeter 15y agoExcellent stuff, as others have mentioned, I thought of Tufte meets Web. The "Tools & Implementation" section had me thinking of the pure data sound programming environment - the way you drag the numerical parameters in the code (cheekily reminiscent of processing) that draws the circles to change values. tangle.js is referenced in the html of the page, and I shall certainly be looking into that for maths visualisations at a more humble level.
- yariang 15y agoI think the best part of it is the car at the top. I can easily play with that for a few minutes. They do say 80% of the gains come from 20% of the effort right? :)
- ineedtosleep 15y agoNice little bit up there, but it was absolutely frustrating at first since I wasn't able to go down the page with my up and down keys and I was wondering why for almost 5 minutes.
- arkitaip 15y agoFascinating read and absolutely gorgeous to look at. This is the guy behind Magic Ink http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk
- kragen 15y agoI agree. And I think you can see both this essay and Tangle as further work in the direction he identified in Magic Ink.
- asolove 15y agoTotally speechless. Feel like this is what I ought to be working on/with. I look forward to the day when online news sources take advantage of the medium to cover wars and budget proposals in this format.
- danso 15y agoWow. This is simply one of the best guides I've seen to anything...ever. It's uncommon for an online guide to have well-written text, even rarer for it to leverage HTML's structure and organization, and almost unheard of to incorporate interactive useful elements that gel with the textual sections. Well done.
- danso 15y agoLooking through the rest of the author's (Bret Victor) website, I'm in awe. If this guy wanted to declare himself the Edward Tufte of interactive visualization, I think he'd have a good case for it.
- egiva 15y agoYeah, and taking a look at his CV he also did a lot of Apple-interface design work. And has a best selling product (neat synthesizer). And a lot of other top-notch work. This guy is a definitely a neo-Tufte candidate for the digital era.
- Radim 15y agohis PhD application is pretty unique, too: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bret/create_humor_gradapp.html http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bret/create_humor_gradapp.html
- Maven911 15y agooh my goodness, that is the most hilarious thing ever, and whats more suprising is that hes an EE and not a CS major
- wiredfool 15y agoThis is beautiful.
- jonnycowboy 15y agoIs this behaviour supported (and easy to use) on mobile devices as well? A great use of this would be for electronic math textbooks for showing students (high school) how various parameters influence graphs, etc.
- xenonite 15y agoImpressed on iPad here...
- danso 15y agoFrom his CV: http://worrydream.com/cv/bret_victor_resume.pdf http://worrydream.com/cv/bret_victor_resume.pdf Apple: >>I designed the initial user interface concepts for iPad, iPod Nano, and half a dozen experimental hardware platforms. Initiated, designed, and prototyped over seventy concept projects, including radically reinvented interfaces for video editing, animation, drawing, learning, collaboration, mail, photos, and much more. Invented features for Mac OS X Lion. Worked with designers and engineers from all parts of Apple. Routinely presented to top-level management
- hendzen 15y agoHe sounds rather bitter about his experience at apple: http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple
- 9999 15y agoDid he actually expect that the work he created would all be used? Or that if it wasn't used that he would be able to take that work (now property of Apple) and show it to the public? I don't think either positions can be considered reasonable. Also, in general, direct manipulation of objects (mapped to real world gestures/physical object interaction) is not the end all be all of HCI. The use of abstraction in the pursuit of increased expressiveness and user input magnification is perfectly acceptable. Being able to immediately understand something is not more important than being able to efficiently accomplish a task repeatedly.
- enjalot 15y agoThis is the future of education. He just laid the blueprints.
- VBprogrammer 15y agoI don't know whether this was a one off, a subject which he was able to knock out of the park or if you are right. I do think someone should pay him a lot of money to find out.
- icandoitbetter 15y agoDefinitely not a one-off project. It's part of his "Kill Math" series that he started earlier this year. Check out the introduction: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
- enjalot 15y agoregardless of whether he continues (it looks like and I hope he will) my point was rather that everyone should follow these blueprints. I know I'm inspired!
- colanderman 15y agoBeautiful site. But I hope anyone actually trying to solve the example problem of guiding a car on a road uses a PID controller and not a binary threshold. Here's an interactive example for those interested: http://fstutoring.com/youlearn/pid/controller http://fstutoring.com/youlearn/pid/controller
- joshhart 15y agoI agree. It's a nice site and a lovely visualization, but it's not the right way to solve the problem. A PID controller or something similar like a Kalman filter is the way to go. The Anybots robots are a great example of a PID filter in action.
- icandoitbetter 15y agoBret Victor is one of the great people working in computing (not computer science) today. I expect something paradigm-shifting from him in the coming years.
- div 15y agoI'd never come across his site or anything by his hand before, and feel like I've missed out on a lot. On the upside, I'm excited at going through all of his archives. I haven't felt inspired like this in quite a while.
- danso 15y agoYou feel exactly the same way I do.
- kragen 15y agoThis is a good example of how to make a high-confidence prediction about the future: look for something that's already happened, and predict that it will have happened soon. In other words: he's already published paradigm-shifting things!
- icandoitbetter 15y agoObviously hidden in my statement was the assumption that what he's produced so far is not paradigm-shifting stuff. But go ahead, be snarky.
- kragen 15y agoIs that because you haven't read Magic Ink, or because you have read it and you don't think it's "paradigm-shifting"?
- tambourine_man 15y agoDamn this guy is good. Check the whole site out, well worth it.
- xtacy 15y agoVery impressive, but I am not sure his comment about Mathematica is right. The Wolfram Demonstrations project is about aiding such explorations in Mathematica. It may not look as pretty, but it's definitely capable of enabling explorations using the Manipulate[] command. http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ Example: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DigitalTiltShiftPhotography/ http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DigitalTiltShiftPhotograph... http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Manipulate.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Manipulate.html
- programnature 15y agoWork is very nice by web standards, but Mathematica's version of interactive documents is much more sophisticated. Strange that he seems to be unaware of what Mathematica can do, given the rant on tools at the end. Its pretty much exactly what he wants, only just proprietary and not on the web.
- bbq 15y ago"Its pretty much exactly what he wants, only just proprietary and not on the web." Which is exactly what he doesn't want. The authoring tools should be accessible to everyone. Secondly, after exploring his site I'm guessing Bret would reject Mathematica even if it were free & open source. Because even then it's not accessible to everyone - you still need to know how to program.
- programnature 15y agoOne of his featured projects is http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle It requires knowing how to program. All I'm saying is that its a shame he doesn't seem to know about what Mathematica has done in version 6 and beyond, since its seems squarely up his alley... which is ironic because he specifically calls out Mathematica in the article for not being interactive enough.
- bbq 15y ago
- nagrom 15y agoI'm a physicist studying nucleon structure. This is a field so complicated that other physicists typically shake their heads and mutter "must be mad". We typically work at several layers of abstraction. This (Tangle) is the one tool that I've seen that is capable of communicating well to non-physicists what I do, without their needing to know Mathematica or C++ in detail. I really need to get around to writing a web page that does that. Awesome. Inspiring. Ridiculously, breathtakingly good. Bret's entire website is outstanding.
- rottencupcakes 15y agoDoes it bother anybody else that he fails so miserably at solving the example he uses for this article: keeping the car on the road?
- nagrom 15y agoNo. He's not trying to keep a car on the road. He's trying to let you understand the problems behind keeping a car on the road, so that you should solve that problem for yourself.
- rottencupcakes 15y agoI'm sorry then. I just personally find that how dumb his example is keeps this from being interesting at all. Why not pick an example where his clear ability to make useful visualizations reveals some startling insight about an initially complex system that he then abstracts away to simplicity? EDIT: Thanks for downvoting guys. If you felt this blog post revealed something fundamental and astonishing, how about explaining it to me instead of downvoting me out of anger? I think I'm done posting on this website.
- Volpe 15y agoI think the downvotes reflect the fact you are belittling this post when it is clearly brilliant. Your reasoning that "he doesn't keep the car on the road" misses the point. He's demonstrating abstraction itself, and using a medium (reactive documents) that are really engaging. Focussing on the car itself, kind of misses the point. Calling his examples "dumb" just looks petty and deserves the downvotes, there is nothing about this that is "dumb"... it verges on "genius".
- jpitz 15y agoThe blog post revealed something or probably two somethings fundamental and astonishing - one being a new ( to me ) process of problem solving, and the other being an almost virtuosic display of visualization. I disagree that it was anything to do with car control algorithms. As the author says, that example was picked after watching Alan Kay use it. Maybe the author felt Dr. Kay was a good example to emulate.
- michaelchisari 15y agoThis is definitely one of those moments where something inspires me to look at everything I'm working on and want to throw it all away, and rebuild it at this level.
- gfodor 15y agoBret Victor, as usual, is a humbling reminder of how much I don't know and how constrained my thinking is. Bravo!
- AdamTReineke 15y agoThat was fantastic. In case you missed it, use the arrow keys to move the car in the header to jump up the ladder.
- pyre 15y agoAnnoyingly, the arrow keys are hijacked, and I can't use them to scroll the page.
- phzbOx 15y agoLooking at his website, his resume and his project, I just feel like stopping everything I do. A little bit like if you start to run for a couple miles and after 5-6 when you're pretty tired, you ask your friend how much remains. And he smile at you, start running even faster and says 195miles. Or, it's like playing Starcraft agains a good player. You get beaten pretty hard but you still played your best and are proud. But then, somehow, you play a real professional gamer.. and you just feel like stopping playing that game. Nothing works, you look like a total beginner, you get 5/0-ed, and then, you learn he was on the phone the whole time. Meh.
- sriramk 15y agothis is exactly how I feel after spending the last 60 minutes reading through his site.
- esk 15y agoIf someone had told me his work had been done by a devoted team of a dozen people, I'd still be tremendously impressed that only twelve people managed to accomplish so much. The fact that it's one man? It's chilling. Try looking at things another way—he's generously provided us all with an incredible foundation upon which to build our own things. After having read a few of his essays, I certainly feel changed.
- phzbOx 15y agoOk well, it's been 3 hours I'm on the website; reading, looking the source, bookmarking lots of things, buying new games and books. This guy is simply amazing. Please, do yourself a favor and get a look at these links: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links http://worrydream.com/#!/Links
- kragen 15y agoI feel exactly the opposite way. I find this essay and his site in general really inspiring, and I always get lots and lots of ideas for things to do when I read them! I'm also really glad he's implemented Tangle, because it means I don't have to; I can just use it. Although I haven't yet.
- jpitz 15y agoI see what this author has done, and I wonder to myself if I could ever possibly have the time to write myself tools to do the things he suggests. Then I wonder if I have the time not to.
- defdac 15y agoThe intro is a really good guide on how to build interesting (exploration) games. Minecraft comes to mind, for example people making charts of ore beta distributions in effort of understanding the inner workings of the world they play.
- jsilence 15y agoAwsome!
- nitrogen 15y agoThe only thing that could make this better is if the arrow keys still worked for scrolling (Firefox 7).