Download Mac Note that the Mac builds of OpenModelica are discontinued after 1.16. An alternative that is fast and works on all recent versions of OSX is installing on a Linux virtual machine; there are pre-built virtual machine images available. This will show you how to initialize openGL on Mac OS X 'using c to code' -open Xcode -Create a new project select command line tool, Type 'C stdc' -Im. T rust the people to get it right. It's early November 2014 at the W Hotel in San Francisco and Blocks Wearables has just lost out on half a million dollars of prize money to the autonomous wrist. The intertank test article joins both more test hardware and actual flight hardware of the world’s largest rocket here in Huntsville. Over the course of the year, it will be joined by even more test articles, including those giant fuel tanks, while being accompanied by less flight hardware – while it’s cool to have giant rocket parts in Huntsville, it’s even cooler to have them in.

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Where good ideas come from. Is Chrome OS a good idea?

I recently read the book ’Where good ideas come from: The Natural History of Innovation’ by Steven Johnson. It was an exciting read. The book attempts to define seven primary patterns that recur in all innovative processes and ideas in Earth’s history, both natural and cultural. The beauty of the book is in how elegantly the author relates ideas from different scales and environments. For example, he explores and derives analogies from varied ideas in disconnected environments like ‘the idea of carbon based life by nature’, 'the diverse life forms and the biological innovation of coral reefs’, 'the idea of Twitter in Internet by humans’. By surveying various forms of innovations in human history and natural history, Steven gives a compelling case for the importance of all his 7 patterns. The patterns are Adjacent Possible, Liquid Networks, The Slow Hunch, Serendipity, Error, Exaptation and Platforms. I am going to concentrate on just the first pattern.

Adjacent Possible

At any point in time, the world is capable of only finite innovations. The innovations are the first-order combinations of the other ideas available at that time. In Steven’s words,

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.

The new idea that can be reached by combining ideas currently available is called an “adjacent possible” (A term coined by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman). To use the simple analogy given by Steven, imagine that there is a palace with an infinite number of rooms. Opening a door will lead you to a room with say 10 other doors. Opening one of these 10 doors will lead you to a room with few other new doors. So, to travel to a room at the second level, you should have opened a door at the first level and reached a room at the first level. It’s not possible for anyone to jump straight into the rooms at second or higher levels. Also, you can only travel to a fixed set of rooms at any point. As you open a door and enter into one of these rooms, you get new doors to open and you find new rooms in your 'adjacent possible’. Ideas are like the rooms in the palace. An idea at the fifth level becomes possible only when we have traveled through the ideas in the first four levels. As Steven puts it,

What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.

I will explore two of the interesting examples for adjacent possible presented in the book - one from natural history and one from human history.

Why life was possible on Earth

Life is the single greatest invention of nature. We still haven’t cracked the rare chemical reaction that lead to the creation of life - “the point at which chemistry and physics gave way to biology”, as Steven puts it. However, we know that all life on earth is Carbon-based life. Even though Silicon has the same valence electron(four) as Carbon and occurs hundreds of times more abundantly than Carbon, nature has favoured carbon-based life instead of silicon-based life. The reason turns out that silicon is not as versatile as carbon in making double and triple bonds that create the long chains and rings of fatty acids and sugars. Also Silicon requires far more energy than Carbon to form bonds and Silicon bonds readily dissolve in water (a major ingredient of prebiotic earth). In other words, carbon was ready to explore its adjacent possible and the environment of prebiotic earth with water encouraged the collision and exploration of new carbon molecules. The famous Miller-Urey experiment simulated the conditions of primordial soup (containing water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) and used pair of electrodes to simulate lightning. Results showed that the Carbon atoms, present only in methane(CH4), were able to spontaneously recombine into many of the organic compounds essential for life: sugars, lipids, nucleic acids. Scientists were able to show that more than 20 different amino acids were generated in original Miller-Urey experiment conducted in 1952 and, from our latest understandings of prebiotic earth, if we included more possible prebiotic molecules, the experiment created more diverse molecules.

Once the first carbon-based single-cellular life emerged on earth, then evolution by natural selection took over. Unlike the origin of life, we have immense evidences for evolution by natural selection and we understand how it works. Evolution is one giant exhibition of exploration of the adjacent possible. There is a prevalent misunderstanding among the public that it’s improbable for a process like evolution to have created complex things. The fundamental understanding of evolution as an agent for exploring adjacent possible throws some light on how evolution could create seemingly improbable things like the human brain, a beautiful flower or a beautiful cuckoo sound. They were not created in one step. They are a result of a serious of billions and billions of steps of exploring the adjacent possible. As Steven points out in his examples,

When dinosaurs such as the velociraptor evolved a new bone called the semilunate carpal (the name comes from its half-moon shape), it enabled them to swivel their wrists with far more flexibility. In the short term, this gave them more dexterity as predators, but it also opened a door in the adjacent possible that would eventually lead, many millions of years later, to the evolution of wings and flight. When our ancestors evolved opposable thumbs, they opened up a whole new cultural branch of the adjacent possible: the creation and use of finely crafted tools and weapons.

As pointed in the above example, nature didn’t create a flying bird in one step. The possibility of a bird came into the realm of adjacent possible only when the velociraptor evolved to have the semilunate carpal bone. And it took millions of years of explorations of the adjacent possible (by mutations) to evolve a bird. If the semilunate carpal bone didn’t have a survival advantage (of more dexterity) and nature didn’t favour it, then wings would have never been in the realm of adjacent possible (and humans might have never got the inspiration to build an airplane!). Steven puts this in perspective when he says,

Four billion years ago, if you were a carbon atom, there were a few hundred molecular configurations you could stumble into. Today that same carbon atom, whose atomic properties haven’t changed one single nanogram, can help build a sperm whale or a giant redwood or an H1N1 virus, along with a near-infinite list of other carbon-based life forms that were not part of the adjacent possible of prebiotic earth.

Why the Father of Computer couldn’t build a computer

Like life in earth’s natural history, one of the greatest inventions in human history is the Computer. The mastermind behind the idea of a programmable computer is Charles Babbage and he is aptly called the 'Father of Computers’. His ’Analytical Engine’, proposed in 1837, was the first programmable computer (The world’s first programmer was an English lady, Ada Lovelace, who wrote instructions for Babbage’s analytical engine). But unfortunately, Charles Babbage was never able to build his analytical engine. This is because Babbage didn’t have the 'right spare parts’ to build his computer. In the nineteenth century, the analytical engine has to be built with all mechanical parts with moving objects. Building the complex analytical engine with mechanical parts was impossible. Babbage died without completing his dream computer. Eventhough the idea of a computer was available in 1837, it took more than a century for the first programmable computer to be build. We had to wait till the electronic-era for Babbage’s dream to be realized. In other words, a programmable computer was not in the realm of adjacent possible in 19th century. Babbage was “ahead of his time”. It’s as if he saw what was inside the 1000th level room in the palace of ideas, through his brilliance. But we had to wait till all the intial 999 doors were opened and building a computer was in the adjacent possible. As Steven’s elegantly puts it,

trying to create an Analytical Engine in 1850 was the equivalent of those fatty acids trying to self-organize into a sea urchin. The idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine is still a vaporware.

Why is Chrome OS a good idea now?

Few days after I read 'Where good ideas come from’, Chrome OS netbook (Cr-48) was launched and I was fascinated by Eric Schmidt’s (CEO of Google) closing speech in the launch event. You can read the transcript at Cloud Computing: the latest chapter in an epic journey. Eric explains how the idea of cloud computing is as old as 1983, when Sun introduced a diskless computer. Later in the 90’s after the innovations of Web, Oracle had introduced something called as “network computer”. It’s similar to a Chrome OS netbook. But the concept of Network Computer failed. Eric explains that the concept failed in the 90’s because

the web couldn’t compete with the scale and power of the then-existing desktop applications, which at the time were Ole and Win32 and various Mac APIs.

And today, after 15 years, we have 1000 times faster networks, CPUs, and screens. Around 2004, the advent of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) enabled building powerful web-applications like gmail. Interfaces competent with desktop applications could be finally built. The model of cloud computing, where thousands of networked computers do complex operations, while the client(browser) provides high-quality user interface, became possible. As Eric explains it

we’ve gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks… the kind of magic that we could imagine 20 years ago, but couldn’t make real because we lacked the technology.

To summarize Eric’s argument, Chrome OS is now in the adjacent possible. We can see the striking similarity between how building first computer took more than a century since its inception and how creating a Cloud computing platform took decades after its inception. Although the idea of cloud computing could be conceived years before, like the original idea of an analytical engine, we had to wait till Moore’s law would grow by a factor of 1000 for Chrome OS to be in the adjacent possible. Again “the idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet”.

Moral of the Story

The important takeaway from understanding the 'Adjacent Possible’ is as Steven says,

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines…. The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.

And talking about the kind of environment that creates good ideas,

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innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges—will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.

Finally,

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The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

The more number of parts - mechanical or conceptual - we are equipped with, the more ideas that are waiting to be explored in our Adjacent Possible.

P.S: This essay is dedicated to my friends who tease me for buying a Kindle. :P I have hereby proven that I have read atleast one book and purchasing the Kindle was useful. You guys can stop teasing me ;) And I also recommend interested people to read the book. After all, I covered only the first pattern. There is so much exciting stuff about the other 6 patterns.