Intuition

Getting back in shape. I ran some Mathematica examples with random numbers. I did calculate $$\pi$$ many years ago with a Texas Instruments (TI) programmable calculator I bought. I wonder where that electronic wonder is. I also bought a little computer in Boston, Radio Shack I believe it was. It even had an ink printer. All that while my thesis adviser had access to multimillion dollar  computer equipment, as he was getting ready to calculate the proton mass with the MILC collaboration. Neither them, nor I got universal acclaim, at least my effort was more modest.

I got some PCs at the Autonomous University of Puebla in the early 80s. I played with mappings, and even got two papers published. All along I was convinced that there was more than number crunching. Now I have some insights I want to develop; without having spent huge amounts of computer time. Some people are close to ideas I have gained. One is David Deutsch, and  other Stephen Wolfram.

I have a ten second Python script calculating $$\pi$$ to two exact figures. My TI used to take hours for this feat. In the mind frame of the Singularity, I guess this is expected. More than the actual time each simulation takes, what I emphasize here is what does it mean?

In a few hours the State of Georgia will kill Troy Davis. He must be thinking fast right now. I do not know when my time is due, but I have to concentrate nonetheless.

More important than the ten seconds the Python script takes to estimate this ratio of circumference to diameter, I think it is important to notice how long it takes me now to run the simulation, and how much it took me earlier in the day. I had forgotten how to run a script. So I was typing the damn thing every time, now I wrote the script pi.py, and I just type in my terminal python pi.py, wait ten seconds and voilà.

According to professor Deutsch, what distinguishes us from every thing we know, is our ability to EXPLAIN. We are universal explainers. He also points out that explanations are generative, i.e., given an explanation we can change the world.

What can I explain, once I am getting my programmer's mojo back?

A program is an explanation, so good, that even a computer can understand it.