9 ms·

Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

409 points by espeed 13y ago

dmazin 13y ago
How inspiring it is that Bret Victor diligently designs the presentation of his content: to me this is one of the reasons he's apart from others, where often even a great design thinker simply leaves a talk or slides or an essay to be presented however it will, like a philosopher who sets aside her inquisitive attitude in real life.
pasiaj 13y ago
Is anyone else having trouble with the video on Vimeo?
- Walkman 13y ago
  yes, but you can just download it and watch it with VLC :)
SnowProblem 13y ago
I knew the name sounded familiar. Bret Victor also gave a great talk called Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366).
- espeed 13y ago
  If you enter through the home page, you can see a list of his other talks: http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple
- zhemao 13y ago
  A lot of the stuff here (especially the circuit simulator) were discussed in Inventing on Principle.
tsopi 13y ago
This will for sure speed up research. Thinking all the extensions of this technology is impossible... or is it? ;)
anigbrowl 13y ago
This got posted to HN twice in April and died with only a few points and no comments. glad to see it's finally finding an audience here.
- espeed 13y ago
  Yeah, the video got posted a while back, but at the time he hadn't created the interactive page. It's cool to see how much thought he puts into presenting each idea. He doesn't stop with just the talk.
  - DanielRibeiro 13y ago
    Bret Victor also has many other amazing and thought provoking talks: Inventing on Principle: http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366 Stop Drawing Dead Fish: http://vimeo.com/64895205 http://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: http://vimeo.com/66085662 http://vimeo.com/66085662 The Future of Programming: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954
anfedorov 13y ago
I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive: "here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the word "logarithmic", we don't need to reconstruct that relationship in our head, you can just see it" Does the average reader of Nature need to be shown a graph of what a linear, constant, logarithmic, and inverse relationship looks like? I don't think so. That said, I imagine there are highly terse and technical ideas that cannot be simply represented in the current mediums of publication and which could benefit greatly using a presentation using an interactive widgets, making more complex ideas more easily communicable.
- tsunamifury 13y ago
  The average reader can probably easily imagine y=2 to y=2x to y=X^2 relationship, but its becomes harder when the rates change. Visualizing y=N to y=Nx to y=x^N where N is any given number is fairly hard to see accurately in my head since it adds a new dimension (time) to the visualization. Giving a slider where N can be visualized over time shows how changes in N accelerates y=x^N away y=Nx. These compound complexities better seen in interactive widget as the average mind is not well equipped to visualize them.
- gridspy 13y ago
  When introducing a new visualization, First you show familiar curves such as y=x and y=x^2 as context for more complex curves that follow.
- swalsh 13y ago
  The point is now someone who isn't the average reader of Nature can understand the concept... Sometimes I feel like nerds kind of enjoy the exclusivity provided by "cryptic" notation. What Bret is doing is not genius level stuff, he's just doing what a lot of people don't have the balls to do. Attempt to make "hard" things easy enough for "regular" people to understand by appealing to the right side of their brain.
dirkk0 13y ago
Bret Victor is awesome. Check out his website - when I first discovered it, I spent hours there, reading even his poems. ALBATROSS gave me the chills.
- JeroenRansijn 13y ago
  Same here! His thinking had a huge impact on my thinking.
seivan 13y ago
Bret Scares me. He makes feel inadequate on so many levels. Am I alone on this? I don't care for most 'successful' startup people and others, but Bret in particular - is amazing.
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  "Count your blessings, not your troubles." -Dale Carnegie.
- jacobolus 13y ago
  Bret is a lovely and amazing person, but don’t sell yourself short. I guarantee you if you come up with a topic or problem to work on, and devote 10+ years to full time reading/tinkering/inventing/implementing in the field, allowing yourself to be creative, sweating the tiny details, and worrying more about making your inventions wonderful than profitable, you will be able to amaze yourself and all of the rest of us with what you make.
  - calinet6 13y ago
    This is quite astute. Truly, I only dream of what the world would be like were we free to pursue our most profound curiosities instead of only our most profitable ones.
    - otisfunkmeyer 13y ago
      We are.
      - kevinflo 13y ago
        The we you're referencing includes very few people in the world.
        IanCal 13y ago
        I would think the number of people who are free to do this is significantly higher than the number of people who actually do it.
jdmitch 13y ago
>This page is an attempt to "explode" a demo-driven talk into a skimmable, browsable, gistable form, where individual ideas can be quickly referenced later. This reminds me of another tool, Korsakow[0], which attempts to do a similar thing in a different way with documentary material, by presenting it in "shortest narrative units" or SNUs that relate to each other. It is one of a number of "interactive documentary" tools (like Mozilla's Popcorn [1] to some extent) but I wonder if it could be repurposed to "explode" a talk in a slightly more digestible way that could be reproduced by those of us who don't have Bret Victor's skillz. [0] www.korsakow.org [1] www.popcornjs.org
- ridicter 13y ago
  Thanks for posting both of these! I'm very interested in tools that allow you to switch between the linearity of narrative (e.g., a film) but then break out into the non-linearity of systems. I think these tools could be especially useful for helping people understand systems like climate change.
rhinoe 13y ago
The scientific paper isn't designed for people who need explanation/visualisation of a logarithmic curve. People who read that paper should be able to quickly decipher what the authors have written – their writing is consistent with normal mathematical instruction. The electrical drawing would be obvious to anyone who is used to working with them. There are obvious places where this would work– dissemination of material is always useful in many different forms. But this is NOT an answer to a question that is being asked. Rather, it is an alternative form of dissemination to an alternative audience.
- lstamour 13y ago
  Fully admitting I've only read the website's summary bullets: I disagree. The point to me is not as much dissemination of material but thinking through materials in a language other than left to right words or symbols. It harkens back to renaissance books in which words and scribbles mixed together in what was, for the times, a coherent mixture. We're talking note-taking for instruction, tools to think about and optimize problem solving ... tools for thinking rather than sharing, even if the source appears to be sharing or instruction right now. That may not be true in the future... I, for one, am sick of OneNote being "the best thing since lined paper" and living otherwise with notepad.exe alternatives. What, precisely, will bring the tablet from its consumption roots into a true work/thinking device? There's a lot of room for more visual note-taking apps, and eventually that will be the new low-hanging fruit of computer vision and natural language input. Someday, for some tasks, at least.
- floatrock 13y ago
  How did the people who read that paper get to the point that they are able to quickly decipher what the authors had written? Brute force repetition. Back in high school I played a musical instrument. I practiced my scales, was quizzed on them, then practiced them some more for years. I got pretty high-school-good at this instrument, enough to earn a small scholarship. I never continued it into engineering school though, and one of the milestones I never reached was the ability to improvise within a key. You see, despite practicing the fingerings of the different keys hundreds of times, it wasn't enough to gain the intuition needed to just feel it out on my own. Those people who read that paper and could decipher what the authors had written HAD practiced their scales enough times to develop that intuition. Bret isn't trying to provide the most compact representation out there. He's trying to present the best model that helps you build that intuition the fastest. In music, you had to spend hours repeating the same scales so your fingers would get hard-wired into the valid combinations for a specific keys... the question is how can we build tools and techniques that help us reach that level of effortless mastery faster.
flyrain 13y ago
Where can I get the tool he showed? Did he publish it?
- zhemao 13y ago
  A friend of mine asked him this after we saw it in his "Inventing on Principle Talk". Here is his response: > Thanks! The tools I showed were just prototypes that I made for the talk. I don't have plans to make them into products myself. (But someone else might!)
  - flyrain 13y ago
    Thanks, I can not wait for it. Anybody take this job?
    - zhemao 13y ago
      Not that I'm aware of, which is rather unfortunate. One way to do this might be to take an existing open source SPICE implementation such as NGSPICE (http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/ http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/) and build a GUI around it that provides the real-time visualization of the signals. In the meantime, if you're looking for a free, easy-to-use circuit simulation tool, I've used LTSpice (http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/ http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/) in the past for my EE classes. The Windows version runs pretty well under Wine and the UI isn't too shoddy. It's pretty far away from Bret Victor's vision though, as you need to rerun the simulation again in order to see a new plot of the node voltages and currents.
MarcusBrutus 13y ago
I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.
- saraid216 13y ago
  So, it would suck to introduce you to this guy named Ludwig Wittgenstein.
  - MarcusBrutus 13y ago
    Inability to hold educated conversation on Wittgenstein should not be taken to reflect badly on anyone's intellect.
- logn 13y ago
  I see your point. However, these tools for thinking, they give you time to think more things and also allow you to think on new levels, which may let you attain the previously unthinkable. And you might be able to combine different ideas to understand new systems and conceive of new tools to discover more. Further, on an individual level, each person might be able to think what maybe they personally couldn't think otherwise. And in that, communication might happen which gives rise to new thoughts.
- blacksmith_tb 13y ago
  I tend to agree, though I suppose it's not entirely proven that it's never failed. But the "unthinakble thoughts" argument seems to be to go in two different directions - the analogy to sound is misleading; we have reason to believe in the existence of ultrasonic vibrations, and they don't require us to hear or not hear them. But thoughts don't exist separate from our minds. Truly unthinkable thoughts wouldn't be thoughts at all. What the concept seems to represent here is "novel ways of thinking" and those are in fact generally not impossible to share with other thinkers (luckily).
- aroberge 13y ago
gd9 13y ago
Haven't watched the whole thing, but scrolling down and reading his closing makes me not want to watch it. He complicates the simple procedure "Completing the Square" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square). Take half of the b coefficient, square it, and add it to both sides gives x^2 + 10x + 25 = 64 or the completed square (x+5)^2 = 64 or x+5 = 8 or x=3.
- dcre 13y ago
  That's a quote from al-Khwārizmī[1], the medieval Persian mathematician whose name the word "algorithm" comes from. Victor didn't complicate the process. He used that quote to illustrate his claim that it's precisely because of innovations in symbolic representation (i.e., representing the equation as x^2 + 10x + 39) that you are able to think of the process as simple. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...
l33tbro 13y ago
IMO - Abstraction is almost a prerequisite for creating anything interesting or innovative. Meaning: my best ideas always come from playing in non-traditional representational systems within a certain medium. Particularly drawing. I find sketching/scribbling/drawing things generates ideas that I could not have thought of by just writing/brainstorming. You may even be able to apply it to the example of how software development models have jumped paradigms into mainstream business management (eg, agile teams). Bret's onto something here.
mrottenkolber 13y ago
Didn't know about this. Blew me away. The editor looks really awesome. What is the software called? I am somewhat intrigued by the idea to represent arbitrary systems. I wonder where you might hit a wall within the editor, and how you can extend the editor to be able to visualize what might be possible to vizualize now. Like Emacs paired with these capabilities?
- saraid216 13y ago
  AFAIK, it's just a prototype Bret built to illustrate his point.
richardv 13y ago
If you don't have enough time to watch the entire video, just watch the "Linked representations" which starts at 24 minutes (4 minutes long). It's on a 2D graphing library but his visualizations are incredible.
lstamour 13y ago
I wonder if Powerpoint (or Visio, OneNote, VS) will eventually evolve this way. My prediction? We'll see lots of bad examples for 10+ years once software for this takes off, until people actually write up what better ways exist through documenting the good stuff. Oh and geeks will use Latex-style power tools that no one else can figure out :) Perhaps I'm talking about the web once alternative layouts and HTML5 component libraries start taking off... Maybe we'll see the return of Quartz Composer someday. When Apple actually takes non-linear programming seriously.
jgamman 13y ago
i know you all hate on mathematica but isn't this what the CDF computable document format is all about? text, systems modelling and dynamic movement all in the one language/system? (NB i'm not a mathematica user but have always wanted an excuse to get into it)
6ren 13y ago
Counterpoint: he notes our techniques are based on writing, but it goes deeper: our symbolic writing (including mathematical notation) is based on speech, for which we have dedicated linguistic structures in our brains, much as we have a visual center. It is deep-seated, and many have argued fundamentally entwined with sapience. Thus, even if it's not theoretically the best way, it might be the best way for us. But I'm going to argue it is the theoretically best way: Linguistic descriptions have a key advantage over pictorial in that they represent or reference rather than show. This enables them to be compact, and omit unnecessary detail. (Of course, showing rather than telling is a strength of visual representation). Yes, you can have a hierarchy of visual systems, and zoom-in or hide. But a fundamental problem here I think is in choosing the hierarchy - that is, the way the system is modularized. Different modularizations of the same system are often appropriate for different uses of that system, or for considering different aspects of it. For even a slightly complex system, there are a huge number of different modularizations possible, and not all of them are useful. Often, you'll start with a poor one, and eventually have insights moving you towards the ideal one. (Of course, sometimes the "right" modularization is obvious, especially for well-known families of problems). All this is very difficult. My point is that it is easier to switch modularities linguistically than pictorially, by changing your concepts. Without the right modularity, it's difficult to pictorially show just the aspects of interest instead of the whole picture. In contrast, one can linguistically omit detail by referencing it (implicitly, as a separate module). Maybe it's possible to do this visually, though I suspect it thereby would have become linguistic! [Though the above is a counterpoint, I'm very impressed with the talk. He's working both ends of abstraction, with concrete working software demonstrating cool useful practical techniques that, while not universal, would be helpful in many domains; and also framing it within, and using it to illustrate, the deep universal and philosophical idea of unthinkable thoughts. BTW e.g. uncomputable numbers.]
- natural219 13y ago
  My gut reaction is to say that all three of these ways of thinking (interactive, visual, and symbolic) are all useful and should be used where their advantages can be best applied. As a shallow example, I think that the basic visual/interactive representations can be fantastic teaching tools, and once you get an intuitive feel for how the system behaves, you can then switch to symbolic representation and move on to the more higher-order systems which those building blocks are composed of. I thought it was interesting that when he compressed the paragraph describing an equation to is algebraic representation (x2 + 2x = 10), we immediately grokked the algebraic version better, because we have loads of experience reading and manipulating the algebraic expression. If I think back to my own learning career, however, I learned the basic tenets of algebra using -- you guessed it -- interactive and visual representation through Hands-On Equations [1] [1] http://www.borenson.com/ http://www.borenson.com/ (now that I think about it, Hands-On Equations serves as a very nice "tldr" for this speech and the related concepts)
AnaRizaMae 13y ago
brilliant!
spion 13y ago
I'm always torn whenever I see a Bret Victor talk. On one hand, I agree with almost everything he says in the talk, amazed by the prototype tools he presents, the concepts he discovered to make those tools usable. And I can see that in each talk he has some new insights to present, deeper connections, better and more general creations - and thats really exciting. On the other hand, his attitude that he doesn't plan to turn the tools into products, that they're just prototypes, that he expects someone else to come and create actual products - that rubs me the wrong way. The thing is, we've found excellent collaboration platforms exactly for these kind of prototypish things that we don't plan to make a product of yet we would like other people to toy around with the general idea. The most recent incarnation is GitHub. So why not publish some of these prototypes? Its not about the code, its about forming a community that will build upon those ideas. Its about kick-starting the construction, setting it in motion. As far as I can see, that is what Victor is hoping for - people taking these ideas close to their hearts and building them in reality. Is the idea not ready yet? Not exactly polished enough or general enough to be published? The visualization drawing / exploration tool looks like an awesome start to me... I don't understand. Edit: Oh wait. https://github.com/damelang/nile https://github.com/damelang/nile contains the presented Nile viewer. Nevermind.
- austenallred 13y ago
  One particular tweet from Victor explains his point of view quite poignantly, in what he calls the dichotomy between industry and research: "An 'Industry vs Research' dichotomy that I sketched at a conference. I probably should elaborate on it sometime. https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/photo/1" https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/pho... One can understand why, given the options as viewed by Victor, one would choose "research" if given the choice.
  - chm 13y ago
    I get an error that the page doesn't exist.
    - austenallred 13y ago
systemtrigger 13y ago
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_thoughts.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_tho... "Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts." Which prompts today's startup idea: 1. Use Silk Road imitators to send hallucinogens to Amazon Mechanical Turk workers 2. Ask workers to solve impossible problems 3. Pass responses into machine learning algorithm 4. Gain godlike insight 5. Rescue humanity from self-destruction
- thatthatis 13y ago
  Your algorithm becomes a bit implausible at step 4 & 5.
mbrock 13y ago
I think one major reason why Victor's talks are so appreciated is that he shows a deep and serious engagement with humanism, tapping into the same vein as Christopher Alexander, Alan Kay, Jef Raskins, Seymour Papert, and others.

409 points by espeed 13y ago

How inspiring it is that Bret Victor diligently designs the presentation of his content: to me this is one of the reasons he's apart from others, where often even a great design thinker simply leaves a talk or slides or an essay to be presented however it will, like a philosopher who sets aside her inquisitive attitude in real life.

pasiaj 13y ago

Is anyone else having trouble with the video on Vimeo?

Walkman 13y ago
yes, but you can just download it and watch it with VLC :)

SnowProblem 13y ago

I knew the name sounded familiar. Bret Victor also gave a great talk called Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366).

espeed 13y ago
If you enter through the home page, you can see a list of his other talks: http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple
zhemao 13y ago
A lot of the stuff here (especially the circuit simulator) were discussed in Inventing on Principle.

tsopi 13y ago

This will for sure speed up research. Thinking all the extensions of this technology is impossible... or is it? ;)

anigbrowl 13y ago

This got posted to HN twice in April and died with only a few points and no comments. glad to see it's finally finding an audience here.

espeed 13y ago
Yeah, the video got posted a while back, but at the time he hadn't created the interactive page. It's cool to see how much thought he puts into presenting each idea. He doesn't stop with just the talk.
- DanielRibeiro 13y ago
  Bret Victor also has many other amazing and thought provoking talks: Inventing on Principle: http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366 Stop Drawing Dead Fish: http://vimeo.com/64895205 http://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: http://vimeo.com/66085662 http://vimeo.com/66085662 The Future of Programming: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954

anfedorov 13y ago

I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive: "here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the word "logarithmic", we don't need to reconstruct that relationship in our head, you can just see it" Does the average reader of Nature need to be shown a graph of what a linear, constant, logarithmic, and inverse relationship looks like? I don't think so. That said, I imagine there are highly terse and technical ideas that cannot be simply represented in the current mediums of publication and which could benefit greatly using a presentation using an interactive widgets, making more complex ideas more easily communicable.

tsunamifury 13y ago
The average reader can probably easily imagine y=2 to y=2x to y=X^2 relationship, but its becomes harder when the rates change. Visualizing y=N to y=Nx to y=x^N where N is any given number is fairly hard to see accurately in my head since it adds a new dimension (time) to the visualization. Giving a slider where N can be visualized over time shows how changes in N accelerates y=x^N away y=Nx. These compound complexities better seen in interactive widget as the average mind is not well equipped to visualize them.
gridspy 13y ago
When introducing a new visualization, First you show familiar curves such as y=x and y=x^2 as context for more complex curves that follow.
swalsh 13y ago
The point is now someone who isn't the average reader of Nature can understand the concept... Sometimes I feel like nerds kind of enjoy the exclusivity provided by "cryptic" notation. What Bret is doing is not genius level stuff, he's just doing what a lot of people don't have the balls to do. Attempt to make "hard" things easy enough for "regular" people to understand by appealing to the right side of their brain.

dirkk0 13y ago

Bret Victor is awesome. Check out his website - when I first discovered it, I spent hours there, reading even his poems. ALBATROSS gave me the chills.

JeroenRansijn 13y ago
Same here! His thinking had a huge impact on my thinking.

seivan 13y ago

Bret Scares me. He makes feel inadequate on so many levels. Am I alone on this? I don't care for most 'successful' startup people and others, but Bret in particular - is amazing.

mixmastamyk 13y ago
"Count your blessings, not your troubles." -Dale Carnegie.
jacobolus 13y ago
Bret is a lovely and amazing person, but don’t sell yourself short. I guarantee you if you come up with a topic or problem to work on, and devote 10+ years to full time reading/tinkering/inventing/implementing in the field, allowing yourself to be creative, sweating the tiny details, and worrying more about making your inventions wonderful than profitable, you will be able to amaze yourself and all of the rest of us with what you make.
- calinet6 13y ago
  This is quite astute. Truly, I only dream of what the world would be like were we free to pursue our most profound curiosities instead of only our most profitable ones.
  - otisfunkmeyer 13y ago
    We are.
    - kevinflo 13y ago
      The we you're referencing includes very few people in the world.
      - IanCal 13y ago
        I would think the number of people who are free to do this is significantly higher than the number of people who actually do it.

jdmitch 13y ago

>This page is an attempt to "explode" a demo-driven talk into a skimmable, browsable, gistable form, where individual ideas can be quickly referenced later. This reminds me of another tool, Korsakow[0], which attempts to do a similar thing in a different way with documentary material, by presenting it in "shortest narrative units" or SNUs that relate to each other. It is one of a number of "interactive documentary" tools (like Mozilla's Popcorn [1] to some extent) but I wonder if it could be repurposed to "explode" a talk in a slightly more digestible way that could be reproduced by those of us who don't have Bret Victor's skillz. [0] www.korsakow.org [1] www.popcornjs.org

ridicter 13y ago
Thanks for posting both of these! I'm very interested in tools that allow you to switch between the linearity of narrative (e.g., a film) but then break out into the non-linearity of systems. I think these tools could be especially useful for helping people understand systems like climate change.

rhinoe 13y ago

The scientific paper isn't designed for people who need explanation/visualisation of a logarithmic curve. People who read that paper should be able to quickly decipher what the authors have written – their writing is consistent with normal mathematical instruction. The electrical drawing would be obvious to anyone who is used to working with them. There are obvious places where this would work– dissemination of material is always useful in many different forms. But this is NOT an answer to a question that is being asked. Rather, it is an alternative form of dissemination to an alternative audience.

lstamour 13y ago
Fully admitting I've only read the website's summary bullets: I disagree. The point to me is not as much dissemination of material but thinking through materials in a language other than left to right words or symbols. It harkens back to renaissance books in which words and scribbles mixed together in what was, for the times, a coherent mixture. We're talking note-taking for instruction, tools to think about and optimize problem solving ... tools for thinking rather than sharing, even if the source appears to be sharing or instruction right now. That may not be true in the future... I, for one, am sick of OneNote being "the best thing since lined paper" and living otherwise with notepad.exe alternatives. What, precisely, will bring the tablet from its consumption roots into a true work/thinking device? There's a lot of room for more visual note-taking apps, and eventually that will be the new low-hanging fruit of computer vision and natural language input. Someday, for some tasks, at least.
floatrock 13y ago
How did the people who read that paper get to the point that they are able to quickly decipher what the authors had written? Brute force repetition. Back in high school I played a musical instrument. I practiced my scales, was quizzed on them, then practiced them some more for years. I got pretty high-school-good at this instrument, enough to earn a small scholarship. I never continued it into engineering school though, and one of the milestones I never reached was the ability to improvise within a key. You see, despite practicing the fingerings of the different keys hundreds of times, it wasn't enough to gain the intuition needed to just feel it out on my own. Those people who read that paper and could decipher what the authors had written HAD practiced their scales enough times to develop that intuition. Bret isn't trying to provide the most compact representation out there. He's trying to present the best model that helps you build that intuition the fastest. In music, you had to spend hours repeating the same scales so your fingers would get hard-wired into the valid combinations for a specific keys... the question is how can we build tools and techniques that help us reach that level of effortless mastery faster.

flyrain 13y ago

Where can I get the tool he showed? Did he publish it?

zhemao 13y ago
A friend of mine asked him this after we saw it in his "Inventing on Principle Talk". Here is his response: > Thanks! The tools I showed were just prototypes that I made for the talk. I don't have plans to make them into products myself. (But someone else might!)
- flyrain 13y ago
  Thanks, I can not wait for it. Anybody take this job?
  - zhemao 13y ago
    Not that I'm aware of, which is rather unfortunate. One way to do this might be to take an existing open source SPICE implementation such as NGSPICE (http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/ http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/) and build a GUI around it that provides the real-time visualization of the signals. In the meantime, if you're looking for a free, easy-to-use circuit simulation tool, I've used LTSpice (http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/ http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/) in the past for my EE classes. The Windows version runs pretty well under Wine and the UI isn't too shoddy. It's pretty far away from Bret Victor's vision though, as you need to rerun the simulation again in order to see a new plot of the node voltages and currents.

MarcusBrutus 13y ago

I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.

saraid216 13y ago
So, it would suck to introduce you to this guy named Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- MarcusBrutus 13y ago
  Inability to hold educated conversation on Wittgenstein should not be taken to reflect badly on anyone's intellect.
logn 13y ago
I see your point. However, these tools for thinking, they give you time to think more things and also allow you to think on new levels, which may let you attain the previously unthinkable. And you might be able to combine different ideas to understand new systems and conceive of new tools to discover more. Further, on an individual level, each person might be able to think what maybe they personally couldn't think otherwise. And in that, communication might happen which gives rise to new thoughts.
blacksmith_tb 13y ago
I tend to agree, though I suppose it's not entirely proven that it's never failed. But the "unthinakble thoughts" argument seems to be to go in two different directions - the analogy to sound is misleading; we have reason to believe in the existence of ultrasonic vibrations, and they don't require us to hear or not hear them. But thoughts don't exist separate from our minds. Truly unthinkable thoughts wouldn't be thoughts at all. What the concept seems to represent here is "novel ways of thinking" and those are in fact generally not impossible to share with other thinkers (luckily).
aroberge 13y ago

gd9 13y ago

Haven't watched the whole thing, but scrolling down and reading his closing makes me not want to watch it. He complicates the simple procedure "Completing the Square" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square). Take half of the b coefficient, square it, and add it to both sides gives x^2 + 10x + 25 = 64 or the completed square (x+5)^2 = 64 or x+5 = 8 or x=3.

dcre 13y ago
That's a quote from al-Khwārizmī[1], the medieval Persian mathematician whose name the word "algorithm" comes from. Victor didn't complicate the process. He used that quote to illustrate his claim that it's precisely because of innovations in symbolic representation (i.e., representing the equation as x^2 + 10x + 39) that you are able to think of the process as simple. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...

l33tbro 13y ago

IMO - Abstraction is almost a prerequisite for creating anything interesting or innovative. Meaning: my best ideas always come from playing in non-traditional representational systems within a certain medium. Particularly drawing. I find sketching/scribbling/drawing things generates ideas that I could not have thought of by just writing/brainstorming. You may even be able to apply it to the example of how software development models have jumped paradigms into mainstream business management (eg, agile teams). Bret's onto something here.

mrottenkolber 13y ago

Didn't know about this. Blew me away. The editor looks really awesome. What is the software called? I am somewhat intrigued by the idea to represent arbitrary systems. I wonder where you might hit a wall within the editor, and how you can extend the editor to be able to visualize what might be possible to vizualize now. Like Emacs paired with these capabilities?

saraid216 13y ago
AFAIK, it's just a prototype Bret built to illustrate his point.

richardv 13y ago

If you don't have enough time to watch the entire video, just watch the "Linked representations" which starts at 24 minutes (4 minutes long). It's on a 2D graphing library but his visualizations are incredible.

lstamour 13y ago

I wonder if Powerpoint (or Visio, OneNote, VS) will eventually evolve this way. My prediction? We'll see lots of bad examples for 10+ years once software for this takes off, until people actually write up what better ways exist through documenting the good stuff. Oh and geeks will use Latex-style power tools that no one else can figure out :) Perhaps I'm talking about the web once alternative layouts and HTML5 component libraries start taking off... Maybe we'll see the return of Quartz Composer someday. When Apple actually takes non-linear programming seriously.

jgamman 13y ago

i know you all hate on mathematica but isn't this what the CDF computable document format is all about? text, systems modelling and dynamic movement all in the one language/system? (NB i'm not a mathematica user but have always wanted an excuse to get into it)

6ren 13y ago

Counterpoint: he notes our techniques are based on writing, but it goes deeper: our symbolic writing (including mathematical notation) is based on speech, for which we have dedicated linguistic structures in our brains, much as we have a visual center. It is deep-seated, and many have argued fundamentally entwined with sapience. Thus, even if it's not theoretically the best way, it might be the best way for us. But I'm going to argue it is the theoretically best way: Linguistic descriptions have a key advantage over pictorial in that they represent or reference rather than show. This enables them to be compact, and omit unnecessary detail. (Of course, showing rather than telling is a strength of visual representation). Yes, you can have a hierarchy of visual systems, and zoom-in or hide. But a fundamental problem here I think is in choosing the hierarchy - that is, the way the system is modularized. Different modularizations of the same system are often appropriate for different uses of that system, or for considering different aspects of it. For even a slightly complex system, there are a huge number of different modularizations possible, and not all of them are useful. Often, you'll start with a poor one, and eventually have insights moving you towards the ideal one. (Of course, sometimes the "right" modularization is obvious, especially for well-known families of problems). All this is very difficult. My point is that it is easier to switch modularities linguistically than pictorially, by changing your concepts. Without the right modularity, it's difficult to pictorially show just the aspects of interest instead of the whole picture. In contrast, one can linguistically omit detail by referencing it (implicitly, as a separate module). Maybe it's possible to do this visually, though I suspect it thereby would have become linguistic! [Though the above is a counterpoint, I'm very impressed with the talk. He's working both ends of abstraction, with concrete working software demonstrating cool useful practical techniques that, while not universal, would be helpful in many domains; and also framing it within, and using it to illustrate, the deep universal and philosophical idea of unthinkable thoughts. BTW e.g. uncomputable numbers.]

natural219 13y ago
My gut reaction is to say that all three of these ways of thinking (interactive, visual, and symbolic) are all useful and should be used where their advantages can be best applied. As a shallow example, I think that the basic visual/interactive representations can be fantastic teaching tools, and once you get an intuitive feel for how the system behaves, you can then switch to symbolic representation and move on to the more higher-order systems which those building blocks are composed of. I thought it was interesting that when he compressed the paragraph describing an equation to is algebraic representation (x2 + 2x = 10), we immediately grokked the algebraic version better, because we have loads of experience reading and manipulating the algebraic expression. If I think back to my own learning career, however, I learned the basic tenets of algebra using -- you guessed it -- interactive and visual representation through Hands-On Equations [1] [1] http://www.borenson.com/ http://www.borenson.com/ (now that I think about it, Hands-On Equations serves as a very nice "tldr" for this speech and the related concepts)

AnaRizaMae 13y ago

brilliant!

spion 13y ago

I'm always torn whenever I see a Bret Victor talk. On one hand, I agree with almost everything he says in the talk, amazed by the prototype tools he presents, the concepts he discovered to make those tools usable. And I can see that in each talk he has some new insights to present, deeper connections, better and more general creations - and thats really exciting. On the other hand, his attitude that he doesn't plan to turn the tools into products, that they're just prototypes, that he expects someone else to come and create actual products - that rubs me the wrong way. The thing is, we've found excellent collaboration platforms exactly for these kind of prototypish things that we don't plan to make a product of yet we would like other people to toy around with the general idea. The most recent incarnation is GitHub. So why not publish some of these prototypes? Its not about the code, its about forming a community that will build upon those ideas. Its about kick-starting the construction, setting it in motion. As far as I can see, that is what Victor is hoping for - people taking these ideas close to their hearts and building them in reality. Is the idea not ready yet? Not exactly polished enough or general enough to be published? The visualization drawing / exploration tool looks like an awesome start to me... I don't understand. Edit: Oh wait. https://github.com/damelang/nile https://github.com/damelang/nile contains the presented Nile viewer. Nevermind.

austenallred 13y ago
One particular tweet from Victor explains his point of view quite poignantly, in what he calls the dichotomy between industry and research: "An 'Industry vs Research' dichotomy that I sketched at a conference. I probably should elaborate on it sometime. https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/photo/1" https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/392335781374619648/pho... One can understand why, given the options as viewed by Victor, one would choose "research" if given the choice.
- chm 13y ago
  I get an error that the page doesn't exist.
  - austenallred 13y ago

systemtrigger 13y ago

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_thoughts.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17455578/unthinkable_tho... "Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts." Which prompts today's startup idea: 1. Use Silk Road imitators to send hallucinogens to Amazon Mechanical Turk workers 2. Ask workers to solve impossible problems 3. Pass responses into machine learning algorithm 4. Gain godlike insight 5. Rescue humanity from self-destruction

thatthatis 13y ago
Your algorithm becomes a bit implausible at step 4 & 5.

mbrock 13y ago

I think one major reason why Victor's talks are so appreciated is that he shows a deep and serious engagement with humanism, tapping into the same vein as Christopher Alexander, Alan Kay, Jef Raskins, Seymour Papert, and others.