thebigG-v3

This summer semester I decided to take Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which the university I go to offers as an elective for CS majors. Which is awesome, I know! As a computer science student I had been curious for a while about the robots, talking computers that assist Iron Man, and even the “magic” behind things like Siri. Yes even I, someone who is in the “know” about a field like software engineering, which is intertwined with AI in more ways than one, fantasizes (or used to, maybe?) about a future where robots assist us on all kinds of tasks and make our lives better/easier, or in the case of I, Robot, a lot worse. All jokes and fiction aside, the fact is that AI exists already in our lives. In fact it is so infused with our day-to-day lives that we don’t even notice it. You ever look at the weather app on your phone? Do you ever go to Google Translate? Do you ever ask Google for directions? Do you ever ask Siri anything? All of these things use some technique that was born in the field of AI, or machine learning (which is a very close sibling to AI). I could go into all  kinds of impressive, and not-so-impressive, techniques that I learned about in the class. A-Star search; Informed Search; Probabilistic Reasoning; Markovian Models; Neural Nets, etc. But this is not the reason why I write this.

The reason why I write this essay/blog post is because a friend of mine, who is planning on taking the class next semester, asked me a very simple question, “How is AI?”. Well...the truth is that is not a simple question at all. It’s a tough question. Because I do have MANY reservations about AI. They range from the philosophical, technical and even reach out to my ethical concerns about Artificial Intelligence. Now, before I go on, I want to be clear about something: THIS IS A BIASED PIECE. As I go on, you’ll notice I have specific opinions about AI as a software engineer. I also want to state that this is NOT a piece meant to attack/offend anybody/anyone/ any organization that is researching AI or building products powered by AI/machine learning. I think you are all awesome people(a little crazy, but in a good way), and you have my utmost and sincere respect. Now that that is out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Before coming to this class I thought AI was an awesome/fascinating field(at the moment I still do). That with everyone—mainstream media, programmers, Google, Microsoft—hyping up AI, I thought to myself, there has to be reason for all the buzz and fuzz about this “AI thing” . And to be honest, MOST of it is undeniably granted. So...as a software engineer I was surprised by how mathematical AI really was. You’d think that a field that is, as stated before, so infused with our lives would be somewhere on the vicinity of software engineering in regards to practicality. But it’s truly not. The truth is that a lot of problems, rightfully so, have to be theorized/generalized in some way before they’re solved in an intelligent manner by a machine. And this makes sense. Think about it, if you want to talk about path-finding, “paths” aren’t simply cities A-F, and find the shortest path. This could be the surface of a new planet with a different landscape, New York, a colony in the moon or you might even have a case where you’re concerned about the cost of moving a piece on a chessboard. It’s also not just about making the algorithm fast. And it’s not that AI doesn’t welcome nice Big O notations like constant time and linear and logN—and these are becoming less central to any algorithm given all of the crazy-fast hardware we have today and the crazier-faster that is still to come. These are, like any algorithm, preferred over N^2 or something above that. However, AI’s top priority to my understanding(at least if I learned what I was supposed to learn), is to solve problems, or find answers, in an intelligent way.

But what the in the world does intelligent mean, anyway?

This is when AI becomes philosophical. And, if you ever take this class(or at least the specific AI class I took), you won’t be tested on the philosophical definitions of AI. But even though you won’t be tested on those when doing the projects, which is the most important part of the class, you won’t directly use anything philosophical, it’s worth keeping in mind that any algorithm in AI is trying to do things intelligently. This means that brute force is not welcome; that randomness, with some exceptions(like hill climbing), is not very welcome; most things that aren’t generalized(in an intelligent manner) are not very welcome. This is one of the reasons why AI is math-heavy: AI scientists need a way to generalize intelligence. But how general can intelligence really be? Can it really mimic the intelligence of a human to the point that it can compose songs, write an essay on the politics of the world and even make moral judgments? At the end of the day, not really. I mean you can take all of the songs recorded up to this day, and write a fancy neural net(don’t ask me how they work, they’re not super-complicated, but not a walk-in-the-park either) and it can classify and recognize some patterns and put something together….but it’s just re-mixing what we’ve already heard and listened to a million times. So no, AI is not that general. The AI of today is very narrow. This is not to say that it is useless. AI is very useful and will be in the future; speech recognition will get better; self-driving cars will improve; it will be able to write “better” songs. But AI won’t have a face; it won’t (and this is subjectively my opinion) have the ability to make moral judgments(and if we allow it to, then we are fools buying snake oil). As a software engineer I found the radical uses of Bayes Theorem somewhat interesting, but not very exciting. I found myself subscribing to the idea to program intelligence into the machine, rather than program it and tell it what to do. This, if I’m being frank, made me a little uncomfortable. As a software engineer I like tinkering with machines, I like to write programs that solve problems(rather than “program” intelligence and let It solve the problems for me). I felt as if I were being submissive to this idea—I know, it’s a stretch. And yes, I am probably romanticizing programming as a craft, but I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Speaking of programming machines, that reminds me, to the AI people(and I’m speaking about the specific people that guided me throughout the class—professors and TAs) the code did not matter. Which struck me as surprising, and a little unnerving. To them all that mattered was the theorems, excel charts and “report”. Which again, given the fact that the code itself in practice is the building block for the AI agent to do whatever it is that it needs to do, was unnerving—borderline frustrating. I don’t write code to plot charts, theorize formulas or see trends. That’s not to say, I write code without documentation. Documentation is not what we are talking about here. Indeed, self-documented code is a must. But to write code to satisfy Bayes Theorem? That itself is frustrating and, in my opinion, goes against the spirit of creativity in programming. It goes against the lemma I follow when I code—hack away. Hack the malloc calls to the point where all of the segments you allocate are continuous; trick the OS into caching at all levels only your processes; manipulate CPU priorities to make your process priority 1 because the game you’re building is over-bloated with physics calculations and unnecessary art, and that computer does not have a GPU. AI felt nothing like hacking computers. AI felt nothing like engineering solutions. It felt like forcing code to comply with some theorem—Bayes Theorem,  making informed decisions, Perceptron, etc. I seriously respect these techniques, because all of them are incredibly cool and quite impressive. And heck, software engineers do use these techniques today. But, in my humble opinion, an engineer doesn’t have to fully comply with a mathematical rule. They are nice because they make a bunch of assumptions that MOST of the time are true. But in engineering, when we have to directly sometimes interact with hardware and users, some of these assumptions are not very useful in practice. Sometimes as engineers, if we were building an OS, one might have to hard-code stuff with macros in C to make a specific architecture/piece of hardware faster. Sometimes in software engineering, one doesn’t have the luxury of just “throwing memory” at a problem—which is part of the idea of machine learning, along with some statistics. Throw memory at it, implement perceptron and you can classify pictures! Engineers have to keep in mind the cost of adding two gigs of ram—cost in terms of money and resources. As an engineer, when handling CPU scheduling, sometimes one doesn’t know what the best scheduling scheme is. Sometimes engineers have to wait till users actually use the software, and get a “feel” for what’s the best CPU scheduling scheme, given the different use cases. AI doesn’t like hard-coded macros, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t love edge-cases hacks, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t care about beautiful code that might be 10% faster because one follows good practices. AI, from the impression I got in this class, is almost programming-independent. One might even say it finds programming languages hindering because there isn’t a language that fully expresses how “great”(ahem, intelligent) It really is. I could be wrong about these assumptions. Because, heck, what do I know? I’m only a software engineer.

So…I’ve been doing C for two semesters at university now. It’s been fun. There are so many things that, I think, the C language can teach programmers about computer science. File descriptors; memory management; the importance of object-oriented programming; processes; threads; file handling; buffers; pointers(a programmer’s super power); the power of void*(it’s over 5000!)—seriously, void* is like going Super Saiyan 3; it’s very powerful and useful, to say the least. There are too many things to count them all, so many I have not learned yet. But one of them stuck out to me, buffers. I want to disclose this right now before I go on: this is NOT a post about “what’s the best language out there?”. Just like any other programming language, the C language has its pros and cons(looking at you gcc!).

But seriously.

Buffers are cool, and super useful…and very simple to understand. So to anybody that knows what a buffer is, this might not come off as that big of a shock, but to me, someone who started programming in a language like Java, learning about buffers was something akin to a revelation. Like when Goku witnesses Krillin being killed by Frieza and turns into Super Saiyan for the first time. Fine, I’ll stop. But I learned about buffers and used them in various contexts and was utterly amazed at what they can do.

What’s a buffer?

A buffer, in a nutshell, is a temporary space in memory(most of the time on RAM or any type of memory mechanism that is just as fast or faster, like cache) used to transfer data from one place to another. That could be reading/writing files from/to disk; communication between network sockets; streaming video/audio; transferring data between two pieces of hardware like a game controller and a computer via USB. I think that for me the reason why I’m praising buffers so much is because I never thought about this methodology. Before knowing about buffers and I had to read a file, per se, I would do things like, So if I am going to read this file, then I should get the WHOLE size of a file and allocate memory for that ENTIRE chunk. So you might wonder, but what if you’re reading a whole movie and the mp4 is 1.2 gb, then you are going to use 1.2 gb of RAM at a time? Yes, it is a bad idea. Do not do this.

This is why buffers exist.

Instead of reading the ENTIRE 1.2gb(some computers that still exist don’t even come close to having this much RAM) onto RAM at a time, use a buffer! And what you do is simple—you allocate a small chunk of RAM, say 5KB, read 5kb at a time onto your program and use them! Once you’re done with that frame of the movie, if you will, replace the contents of the buffer with the next frame, the next 5KB.

Buffers are magical, colorful bridges.

They are these conductors of bits that allow us to do amazing things such stream Netflix; play online with friends; one day they might make it possible for us to communicate between planets(who knows?!). Imagine a rainbow(hence the image above) where you could send  anything you want on that rainbow to anyone; messages, media, gold, spaceships, planes, food, supplies, the Philosopher’s Stone, secret recipes; bits of any kind in any format. That is the magic behind buffers.

The creative process is a complicated one—especially for programmers. And that’s not to say that people in other trades have it easy, because they do not. But I guess I mention programming specifically because, well, that’s what I do. But the process to writing code is a complex one; it’s something that allows you to be as imaginative as when one writes fiction—yes you can have elves, giants, evil warlocks and even spaceships. Literally—one could have all of these things through the medium of video games. However, the key difference between writing human language and code is the one thing that makes code…well code, and that is logic. No, I dare say that one as a programmer(or coder, is there a difference?) is confined by more than logic. As a programmer(I’m sticking with this one, though I know someone is going to tell me there is a difference, but whatever), but anyway as a programmer one is confined by languages, tools to use, OS, platforms and even licenses. And of course in fiction is similar because I can’t just start writing a story where Dracula and Voldemort fight to the death and sell that story without the consent of JK Rowling, but I think when it comes to programming the thread becomes more interwoven, intricate and even thicker to cut through. And that’s because in stories one can feel the way things are, where things are going and wether Dracula will kidnap Harry Pottter or not. But when it comes to code, well first of all, when it comes to programming the logic almost dictates what one will do. And of course you can’t exactly “feel” logic as when can feel the course, if you will, of a story. Before I even get to throw Dracula and Voldemort into a colosseum I need to think about how I am going to approach this; what kind of graphics will my game have; will the player have the ability to control Dracula and Voldemort or just one of them; will the player be able to control their movements street-fighter style, Mortal-Kombat style or both; what kinds of controls do I want my player to use(keyboard, keyboard-and-mouse, joystick or maybe a touchscreen). And as all things creative, the project/idea evolves as one programs himself/herself through it.

And of course there is also Imposter’s Syndrome.

You’re halfway through your thing and you ask yourself the one-million-dollar question: Can I do this? The fear that maybe you are not cut out for it. The doubt that comes from wanting something so badly. It is a tricky thing to deal with Imposter’s Syndrome, whatever that is anyway. It is a tough thing to deal with especially as a student that is dealing with real life and school life. For some of us have jobs and whatnot. But I think Imposter’s Syndrome, and yes this will sound very corny and obvious, comes from fear. But this is not a shallow-form of fear, or maybe it is. But nonetheless I think that it comes more than anything from this fear of “failure”. Which again: very corny and obvious. Still, I think that we often forget that coding, writing, drawing…anything in life—failure is a learning process.

I went to a hackathon, and I want to write about it.

I feel like there are people out there who might not know what is, so in case you don’t know what a hackathon is; it’s like comic-con for programmers. Only difference—people build things, barely get any sleep and code a lot.

And I’m not going to pretend like I built something remotely cool, because I didn’t. Nonetheless I showed up, breathed in the atmosphere, and coded for like eight hours. I found someone there who wanted to build somewhat of a Yelp for Alexa. I ended up coding to help build the “Yelp” for Alexa, but didn’t get even close. That’s not to say I didn’t learn something while I was there—I did. I learned a bit of MongoDB and that Hackathons are nothing but wonderful. Really, I know it sounds cheesy, but being there you do feel the hunger for innovation and disruption that drives the software engineering world. If you do decide to attend a hackathon, which I strongly would advise anyone to do so, I think I can spare some tips:

1.Plan for it:

One thing I didn’t do was planning. I didn’t mark it in my calendar, didn’t think of anything I may want to build over the course of two days. So learn from my mistake—plan for it!

2. Do not let your level of skill get in the way

Hackathons are for everybody, regardless of wether you can build an app in a day or not. Hackathons are really designed for people to code, but also learn. Take me for instance; I didn’t know Alexa’s “apps” are called skills, or that MongoDB is ridiculously easy to set up in netbeans(I may post a tutorial about this one of these days). So wether you understand a hello world program or not, GO!

3. Get A Squad

Grab people from your class; the bookworm, the cat lady, the dude obsessed with X-Men(that’ll be me). Tell them you’re going to build a video game, the next Tinder, the next Big Thing. The point is: Go with people, make an attempt at building something cool, and if you “fail at it,” the worst thing that can happen is that you’ll learn and grow as a programmer from the experience.

4. Bring Your Overnight Gear

Of course I’m exaggerating bit, but really—hackathons are usually two-day events, so why not sleep there, or not; you can spend that time coding.

5. Haven Fun

Above all have fun. People from all kinds of different backgrounds come together to code, share knowledge and have a good time. And also, you might make a new friend; I promise that you won’t find any Planktons there.

First and Foremost, I’m 21. Meaning that I don’t know much about life, at least that’s what society tells me. And that’s fair—I’ve only lived on Earth for twenty one years, and I only remember about fifteen of those. Nonetheless for the tiny grasp I have on life, I think there is something I should say, or rather have to say, about narratives. About the stories each one of us is. About the substance, if you will, that makes someone who they are.

Take me, for example—Dominican, identity issues, introvert, nerd, confused about career choices(the classic struggle between selling your soul to corporations and doing something because you love it)—the list goes on and on. And yeah that’s me, that’s my story—my narrative. Of course, this will change over time. Today I’m in college, trying to major in Computer Science(because “I love it,” at least that’s what I tell myself). But, at some point or another, I’ll graduate, or at least I intend to. Then I’ll get a job, and if I’m fortunate enough, I’ll grow as a human being. Maybe even give into capitalism, and yes: I am one of those people that will ruin your day by reminding you that we are all under this umbrella, that we’ve agreed to be, called capitalism. That companies study your behavior, make an equation out of your life, and make bank on that. And look, I don’t have that big of a problem with it—I often find myself wanting money. Longing for the comforts of financial security, because you know what? Having money is not necessarily a bad thing. Having zero debt, going to a concert once in a while, having the monetary resources for when someone in the family is sick—it’s nice to be “comfortable.” But I do think that there’s something here that needs to be mentioned, something that I think many people, except for the “starving artists,” forget. And that is: does any of this steal our humanity? Does capitalism, or rather, our fast-paced “lifestyle.” Does this “system” suck what makes us human? Yes, go ahed, call me a hipster—people have three times in my lifetime. And trust me, it doesn't get more bizarre for a Dominican kid than being called a “hipster”. I mean I didn't know what a hipster was till I got to college. Anyway, getting back on the note of capitalism sucking the life out of us, I do think that there is some worth into getting our heads out of asses and saying “do I work too much?”, “should I try something new?”, “Remember when I used to watch movies every weekend and wrote fanfic?” And does it matter whether you keep on doing the things you  “used to do”? I think it matters a lot because, as obvious as it sounds, what you used to do before, and what you do now. Wether that’s watching Anime or writing silly short stories, these things are who you are. They’re things that no one can take away from you. They’re part of your narrative. A narrative that you’re the main character of. A story where you’re the hero, the Captain America, the one that saves the day. And I think that’s the power behind stories. The nature of any story is the fact that we are stories. Also I think this is what makes a book, song, poem, or movie such a powerful thing—these things, with their inherent nature of narrative, represent, better yet, they are who we are. And this, I genuinely believe is what drives us—the fact that I think each of us, regardless of our background, strive to move this story forward.