Promise of AI ChatGPT, Chatbots: How much Truth or Falsehood or Marketing Hype

All the information that chat gpt is providing was already on internet and Google. What chatgpt has done is to provide this info using conversation models that select the most important and the most relevant pieces of information that answer your questions by removing the clutter, redundancy, and  keeping the answer within the scope of the question. What is exciting about the model is its remarkable ability in understanding the question and constructing appropriate grammatically correct replies to the question asked. Which is a skill that people master with great deal of education and experience. This ability has brought the computer to near where it can pass or has passed the famous Turing Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950.

Experience with Google Drive and Dropbox. Why you should junk all of them

I had several terabytes of data in several external drives, now.  This data relates to my research, my research papers, research data, students' reports and data, their thesis and other proposals, analysis, and surveys that I have conducted during my consultancy assignments and other assignments. These contain my personal insights and conclusions about various issues. It is invaluable primary data for my autobiographical notes in my blogpost Learning and Life. Some relate to data from my 5 years at IBA, some data is about my 12 years at KIET, some data is about my 8 years at IoBM, and some data is about my 6 years of ePatterns company, some data is about my experience and operations of L2L. There are my memos, notes, pics, and other reports. There are also my family photos of the last 30 years, over 5000 family documents and letters; there are scans and files containing their transcription. These documents date over a hundred years to mid 19th century. 

Who Owns Your Data?

Around four years ago I decided to put this on the cloud. First, I purchased DropBox and spent hundreds of hours uploading the data from my home computer hard disk around 500GB and another 500GB external drive. Later I found out that it was not a backup but it was a synchronous backup. That is, it instantaneously brought the repository to the same status as my hard disk. Little did I know that when my drive failed, or when I moved the data to another external drive, it will also wipe out my data from the drive. That was enough of a shock to me. It should have warned me that it was wiping out hundreds of my hours of loading time. OK, that was my mistake that I did not carefully review the features and understood the fine print. But, nevertheless it helped me to understand how the cloud appears to individual users

And I said goodbye to DropBox and moved to Google Drive. This time my idea was that I would get around 2TB of space, and I will move all my data from 4 external drives as well as my computer. I thought that once the data is there I could flexibly organize the data, remove the duplicates, order the files according to creation dates/last update dates, and will rearrange the overlapping data that I have backed up over the last decade. 

On Google Drive, it again took me several hundreds of hours of watching the slow upload to the cloud. As it was my personal data, I did not think that I would do it from a high-speed connection at my office. I thought I would be organizing the information at night while putting the upload on during the night. Little did I know that one has to watch the uploads continuously. Otherwise, it would simply give an error and exit. You will have to start once again from zero. There is no way to correct the error, and resume from where it stopped. This was exasperating. I thought OK, this is a one-time effort. Later I would be able to work easily from anywhere. 

Little did I know that eventually when I had uploaded all my data, it had totally hidden the creation date of my files as they existed on my hard drives. The dates visible were only the upload dates. This was impossible for me to organize. The dates were crucial for my data organization process. It told me where to put it and how to organize it. For example, I have pics from my mobiles, cameras, and from other mobiles of my family members. How do organize them if they all have the same upload date? 

The other problem was searching for particular information. It was again impossible. The search is designed by Google for what it wants to show you. It is not designed for you to organize the data into categories, and folders hierarchically and chronologically. Google doesn't want you to organize your information your way. It wants to organize the information as it deems fit. It was impossible to copy a large number of files from one folder to another. It was painfully slow and also very inconvenient to move around. The view simply would refresh to the top, forcing you to scroll down to where you were working. It is impossible to work in which Drive folders if there are a couple of hundred or more files in your folders and you want to merge, organize, collate, move, copy, or remove multiple copies. Work that you can complete and do in a few hours on your hard drive will take you forever on google drive. 

Getting the data downloaded from Google cloud was an experience that taught me that google is saying, hay! guy you don't own the data. I own the data. I will tell you how you can download it. It has made the process so difficult that I would rather do the reorganization again from my external drives rather than download the data from Google. 

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to use an open source repository of the type used by museums and libraries that are designed to keep the data for a long long time. You can't rely on these for-profit, fly-by-night operations that can change the algorithm at any time, and remove permissions from your data assets as and when they want. They may be good for a few years for storing information through high-speed networks. But, they are not for the data that you own.  Irrespective of what they claim, they only have to make it tediously slow certain features to make you wrench your hair in distress. They simply tell you who is the boss. This is the same way the data that you store on google Blogspot and Facebook is not yours. You are not entitled to access your data and tweak it the way you want it to be shown. Yes, you can do it if you have expensive programmers. But, they make sure that you can't use this option because they keep on changing the APIs and their permissions. There are always a step ahead of you. 

Don't believe what they say. It is colonization of your personal space. 

Cloud Security – Who Owns The Data?
https://www.bbconsult.co.uk/blog/cloud-security-who-owns-the-data

Who Owns Your Data?
https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/why-owns-your-data-5f1cdadff84

Technology is as good as the people using it: EVM Technology is just a tool. Its user determines the quality of output

Installing cameras for fighting crime and tax evasion, using computer technology for removing corruption, and implementing EVMs for ensuring transparency of election results are all uses of technology to solve problems. However, "technology is as good as the people using it". Utility of a technology is dependent on the ability and competence of people using it.

EVMs will fail in Pakistan because it is more of a management problem than a technology problem

EVM is a much bigger logistics & management problem than a technology problem!
Assuming EVMs are technologically feasible, now please work out the logistics and management issues of manufacturing, testing, transportation, storage, issuance, receipts, returns, installation, post installation testing, quality assurance, maintenance, malfunction detection, repair, supervision etc of uniquely numbered 7 lac devices. Mind you, that all these devices will have to work flawlessly for only two days out of every five years in 100,000 polling stations spread over big cities, small cities, villages in areas spread over a country consisting of mountainous regions, deserts, plains, etc with highly differring levels of roads, internet, communication infrastructure using over 4 lacs polling staff that is conscripted for election duty from government departments for election duty. Each of 1lac polling stations has at least 7 hardware devices; 1 device for voter identification, 1 control unit, two ballot machines for men and 2 ballot machines for women (out of two, one is for NA and the other is for PA), and 1 RTS machine.

Murphy's Law and Project Leadership during Change Implementations

Whenever we use technology, we should always do a pilot. Do you recall IBA's entry test fiasco of medical colleges of Punjab in late 1990s which was widely covered in the media of that time? I saw the fiasco unfolding in front of my eyes from close at IBA where the untested scanner was put on full scale deployment without pilot. This happened despite my protest, and my eventual formal letter a few months before they were going to go full scale. This led to me being removed from the implementation team (Thanks God I was spared the ignominy on media). I have a case study somewhere.

How Correct is My Data-Cardinal Rules for Data Collection

How Correct is My Data: Cardinal Rules for Data Collection
Written: May 2, 2007
A marketing manager of a pharmaceutical who has recently joined the company is looking at a report lying on his table about the performance of the sales representatives, their individual targets and the actual achievements. He needs to know what is the correctness of the data being presented, and how much confidence should he have in the presented data. What are the specific questions he should be asking that could lead him to determine the level of confidence he should have in the figures.

This paper presents a tool consisting of four rules for determining the correctness of data. It also gives two case studies that show how this tool can be used in improving the correctness of data and removing the errors. The rules are also useful in identifying the redundant steps that can be eliminated during Business Process Reengineering. During the computerization process, the rules help in identifying the step that needs to be first computerized. The framework has been developed on the basis of experience of several computerization efforts across a wide range of companies.

Senator Mazhar Ali - Dreams and Achievements

Sen Syed Mazhar Ali was a man who was ahead of his time. He was a visionary who could appreciate the role of IT in creating wonderful opportunities for Pakistan in 1980s. His apartment complexes set the standard for high quality during 1970s and early 1980s. His Gulshan-e-Maymar town was conceived and constructed decades ahead of the Bahria Town and DHA City. It was established when there was nothing beyond Sohrab Goth. He knew the importance of public-private partnership in developing the revenue resource base back in the 1980s. As part of Resource Mobilization Commission he developed a blue print of how to diversify Pakistan's resource base. As Chairman of the IT Commission, he laid the foundation of the National IT Policy that was developed through public-private partnership in early phase of computerization of the country. He was an important player in the National IT Policy 1997-98 during the Nawaz Sharif's 2nd tenure and Ahsan Iqbal's vision 2020. He was also part of the National IT Policy 2000 formulation during the several working groups formed during the early years of Gen Musharraf rule. His investment in the state of the art institution KIIT at Gulshan e Maymar during late 1990s was the harbinger of how higher education would grow. It boasted during late 1990s the highest number of PhDs after LUMS in private institutions.

Sen Mazhar Ali (1935-2004)

Power of Word in Value Based Education: Discriminating Truth from Falsehood

Honorable Prime Minister, Group Chairperson City School, dignitaries, educationists, teachers and my dear students. I thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to speak about value based education, some thing that is near and dear to my heart. Power of Word emanates from the depth of our feelings. Words are only words unless they have conviction and heart felt emotions supporting the message. The reason why we are talking about values today is because we have lost sight of the fundamental value that used to be ingrained in the lives of the students. Some 40 years ago, all the corridors and halls of the schools in the morning would start with the reverberation of that prayer from Iqbal that outlines the purpose of life of the students: To make my life a beacon of light whose purpose is to remove the darkness from the entire world and to spread light everywhere. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of this noble value. Our education's purpose became my personal career and prosperity for me and my family. My only objective became to have a generator that would lit my home instead of my knowledge spreading light everywhere. 

Artificial intelligence vs data science - A Parallel between Chomsky's Cognitive Science vs Skinner’s Behavioral Science

AI is facing the same challenge today from data sciences that was faced by Chomsky’s Cognitive Psychology when it confronted Skinner’s Behavioral Psychology in early 1950s. The basic issue is whether “intelligence” can simply be understood by observing the input-output relations over a black-box representation of the mind? Is the success of Google data science in predicting outputs usefully from deep statistical analysis of big-data of billions of similar input-output relations a sign of artificial intelligence? Does accuracy of proving its machine generated conjectures through big data analytics can actually replace the need of humans to do science, i.e. to develop hypothesis, design experiments, observe results and develop theories? This talk focuses on some of the questions raised by Chomsky about the recent advancements in AI and draws parallel with clash of Cognitive Psychology with the Behavioral Psychology in the 1950. This talk would illustrate through this parallel the need for AI to understand and develop the internal representations of how humans intelligence work.

Facebook Encourages Unethical Behavior: Metaphysics of Social life based on Lies, Ignorance, Bigotry

Why social media has become the primary source of fake news. Why people in social media communities are likely to become extremists, bigoted, and unlikely to hear or see content that is against their beliefs. Technology is not value neutral. It comes with its own baggage of values. Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter have enabled the technology that gives voice to the baser instincts of humans. It has provided a platform for mass dissemination of lies, fake news, slander, false allegations, lampooning, extremism and bigotry by removing the social costs of these vices. It has disconnected the responsibility of the people from their speech and behavior. Identities of person who have been complicit in the generation of fake news and slander are now hidden. People who started the rumor are no longer easy to identify, trace and track. There is a need to do research on the metaphysics of social media: Lifestyle of social media determines its own metaphysics, which creates its own intentions and generates its knowledge as described in the post  From Lifestyles to Metaphysics

Cyber Control and Cyber Crime: From Panopticon of 18th Century to Imprisonment in Technology Age

"Cyber Control and Cyber Crime : Big Brother is Watching Us" was presented at FPCCI Seminar on Media Security and Cyber Crime on August 17, 2016 at Federation House, Karachi.

Modern Times (1936) CEO monitoring washrooms

This presentation focused on the problems introduced by the pervasive cyber world of today at a higher philosophical level where the existence of human being and the concept of being human is being questioned by the "Internet of Things", and where people are willingly ceding their privacy and the personal control of their lives to external social networking platforms represented by googles and facebooks of today. This cessation of our relationships, our thoughts and feelings and what constitutes our personality to external agencies and allowing them to define who we are and what do we represent is much more sinister and a much greater concern than the issues of Cyber Crime and Cyber Bill that we are discussing today.

Sharing with Responsibility on Social Networks: Avoid Mass Dissemination of Lies and Ignorance

Reliance on unverified sources and unverified reporting and forwarding on social networks have made them a platform for the mass dissemination of ignorance and lies. See for instance some of the Fake Quotes making rounds on the internet: 

How Mina Stampede Happened and How to Avoid it: Hajjis Traffic Management System:

During my hajj of 1996, we were in a segment of road in approximately the same area where Mina 2015 stampede occurred. We experienced how a stampede-like situation begins to build as hajjis begin thronging towards jumaraat. I can still feel the tension developing in the air, the silence of lull before the storm, the panic on the faces of the people, their deep anguished breathing, their anxious glancing to the left and right, their groping for space forward and backward, and the fear and nervousness writ large on their faces, and that waiting as if for a cue to really fly off the handle and start the domino that would lead to the stampede. The apprehension building on the faces of the people as they start coming closer and closer and start pushing more and more. Fortunately, there was no stampede, we avoided it because we along with large number of other hajjis were able to escape out of the road segment where the congestion was developing. We managed to enter the adjoining muktab by creating an opening in its perimeter wall and which, fortunately, in those days were not as tightly blocked for non-muktab hajjis as they are today. From that  muktab, we ejected out to the other parallel road, and from there we retreated back and postponed our attempt to jumaraat for a couple of hours.

Computer Revolution and Moore's Law: A Personal Journey

Moore's Law: Exponential increase
in transistor density and speed

In this post I trace a personal journey of my interactions with the evolutionary stages of computational machines. I feel my decisions in life have been shaped by forces which were not as clearly understood or even visible in the 1970s and 1980s as they are today and are depicted in this graph. Tremendous progress in the speed of the computers and their reduction of costs obeys Moore's law which says that speed of the computer would double every 18 months and the costs would decrease by half every 2 years. This trend has held for more than half century and is depicted in the figure in the context of the microprocessors.

Big Data, Management Transformation and Voyager of Star Trek Movie

V'jer of Star Trek

The growth of digitization and computerization and its assimilation of everything and everyone that it touches reminds me of the first Start Trek - Movie, where the enterprise encounters a huge energy cloud that is devouring extra-terrestrial objects and even planets on its path as it moves towards the solar system and then eventually towards earth. There seems to be nothing that can stop this energy cloud/mass and there is fear that even the entire earth may be swallowed by it. With each
star swallowed and with each planet gobbled, its size increases and so does its power and energy. What eventually happens to this energy cloud is part of the story that needs to be seen in this movie. What is of relevance for us is that the core of this ever increasing energy cloud eventually turns out to be none other than our old NASA spaceship Voyager that was released from the earth in 1977 and which only recently i.e. in 2012 teared out from the solar system and became the first man made craft to enter the inter-stellar space. In this movie, the Voyager during its two hundred or so years of its journey in the interstellar space has mysterious encounters. Through one such mysterious encounter with an energy source, it transforms and acquires the capacity to start attracting objects, gobbling them and becoming bigger and bigger and amassing more and more energy. Anything and everything that comes in its path is not only swallowed by it, but is also transformed into the energy, which accumulated on top of its existing energy, not only increases its power but also the speed with which it gobbles up things with greater and greater ferocity and an ever increasing appetite.

Changing Role of CIO

Changing Role of CIO

Presented at the CIO Summit, May 21-22, 2013, DHA Golf Club Convention Center, Karachi. (Presentation pdf)

We know that we have transited from the industrial age in to the information age. We can put the date of this transition formally to the start of internet revolution in the mid 1990s. What is the impact on workforce when one moves from one age in to another age? To study this impact of change we should look back to the time when we transited from the agriculture age to the industrial age.

One useful parameter is the nature of employment of people. In agriculture age, significant majority was that of farm workers. In the industrial age the significant majority was that of industrial workers.  In early 1900s, in USA, about 70% of the population was farm workers and only 3% were working in the industry. The situation has totally reversed by 1980s when only 3% of population of USA was working in the farms and about 70% of the people were working in the industry. We are now in the midst of the information age. Employees working with information are often called knowledge workers. The shift of the population from the industry workers to knowledge workers is already significant. In information age, only a very small percentage of people around 5% would be industry workers, and 70% and even much more would be knowledge workers.

We can already see the shift. Over the last fifteen years, nature of work in organizations has already changed. Most employees are adept at the use of computers and information technology.  Kids starting from a very early age are born knowledge workers __  Much more proficient and comfortable with mobile phones and computers than their predecessors. It is a common sight to see even a two year old playing with mobile phones. This generation is fundamentally different from its predecessor in the ease with which it lives with the technology and works with it. Gone are the days when the IT department had to convince the higher management about the need for the adoption of the information technology. There is now enough of the pressure from the youth that even die-hard opposers of technology are now forced to change.

There is now widespread use of technologies and platform. Organizations have now fundamentally changed from whatever they were doing to becoming knowledge organizations. Their task has now become to manipulate, process and present data. Their existence has become virtual.  Any organization that fails to see itself and its mission as manipulation, processing and presenting of data in a unique format is destined for oblivion.  It is a matter of life and death for every organization that wants to survive in the information age. The industry is now littered with examples upon examples of organization that failed to see themselves as knowledge processors and were forced to either redefine themselves or to become relics of history.  

Once upon time, we used to consider postal industry to be different from the movie industry, movie industry to be different from the telephone industry, telephone industry to be different from the TV industry, TV industry to be different from the camera industry, camera industry to be different from the computer industry, and computer industry to be different from the telecommunication industry. The boundaries between these industries were dismantled by the information age some fifteen years ago. Only those companies managed to survive who were quick to see themselves as part of the wider knowledge processing industry. The classic distinction of industries and sectors is now obsolete and irrelevant to the economic analysis.

If you don’t see yourself as a knowledge processing industry you are gone. A mobile phone today is a computer, telephone, camera, movie maker, communicator, bank branch, retail outlet, and much more. Anything that you want it to be, even your friendships and family life is now there.

Once upon time there used to be big giant of a bookseller Barnes and Noble. I think it is still there trying to define itself in terms of internet and identity. They did not know from where they were hit. They were sitting smug, not realizing that a virtual competitor called amazon.com came from nowhere and took the central stage in the book selling business. Not content to selling of only the books, amazon had redefined itself as a general retailer as well and is now redefining itself as IT solutions and infrastructure provider.

Microsoft today is not being challenged by a computer company but a search engine on the internet.

In 1997 Encyclopedia Britannica with its over 200 years history was sitting smug. Some diehard crazy individuals thought they could create an Encyclopedia with volunteers and unpaid knowledge workers.  We can give some license to Britannica they were in a different field. But what about Microsoft and its Encarta Encyclopedia. That also got started in 1997. Even they could not foresee the trend. In 2012 officially Encarta division of Microsoft was shutdown. Britannica after its illustrious reign of several centuries starting in 1776 stopped its print business and was forced to simply exist only as an online business. Both a computer giant Microsoft and the print encyclopedia giant Britannic were forced out by a collaborative encyclopedia site that was free and developed by unpaid volunteers, Wikipedia. Newsweek, the big name in the weekly publications established in 1933 was forced to shut down  in 2012. Many other big names in the newspaper industry are already gone. Unable to survive the challenge from the online news.

We have the example of Nokia whose emergence, reaching the status of giant and whose decline has been so rapid. Similar is the case of blackberry now trying its best to survive from the challenge from a company that never classified itself in the mobile business, google.

I am giving these examples to show that if you do not envision yourself as a knowledge processor in the IT domain your existence is threatened. You are doomed.

Let me now give you the example. There are these monster enterprises over the world established over the last few centuries that think they control the generation and production of knowledge. They are known as universities. They think that their biggest assets are their buildings and their campuses. Even the most progressive of government organizations such as the HEC in its latest criteria thinks that the quality of a university is its campus and its physical facilities. They are now sadly out of sync with what has been now labeled as the “avalanche” which is hurtling down the mountain and which is going to shatter all the long held beliefs about the universities and their quality criteria about how to create and disseminate knowledge. How can this not be!

When the majority of the population is a knowledge worker, when all their day they are working with knowledge, creating knowledge, manipulating knowledge, presenting knowledge, then the role of a secluded physical space where the same would be done and would be considered value addition is questionable. Let me pronounce today.

University as we see it today is doomed. Let me tell you how. It is very simple. Whom do you think would take on the role of a university? The primary role of the university is to certify that such and such knowledge processing task i.e. subject has been passed by the student.  I think this kind of certification could easily be done by a company like LinkedIn.  An individual can already endorse the project work of a person on the net. An organization or its authorized representative can then do this endorsement.  Supposing a student does 40 projects for reputable companies like IBM, Engro, Lever , TPS, etc and has to its credit on his linkedin account endorsement from such companies. Each project may correspond in its nature to a relevant course required for a degree. Would you consider this endorsement of practical project much more valuable than an endorsement by a university teacher?

I will give you another example, supposing a student has done 40 courses through MOOCs conducted by the faculty of Stanford, MIT and Berkley. Would you consider their endorsement as more powerful than an endorsement of a university with its ordinary teachers. Same is true by the generation of knowledge. Previously it used to be the domain of specialized labs. Today these labs data is available on line to volunteers and online analysts to study and churn out results. There is democratization of knowledge creation all around. There are now more wonderful and exciting learning environments available on line than with any other teacher. For universities to survive they need to redefine their expertise and leverage the internet to be one step ahead of the technology. Their inability to do this would render themselves to be obsolete and irrelevant to the fast pace of change. 4 years is a terribly long time in the information age to gain any expertise where a technology from its introduction to its zenith and its obsolescence covers the entire product life cycle in a few years.

I have been giving these example to show that the role of CIO is now different. The other day I called the CIO of the university where I work and gave him a number of papers on this avalanche which is about to hit the existence of universities. I told him to develop a business strategy for the institute and assume the role of a leader who can guide the higher management about the trends and the followings in different areas. He fortunately had already done a MOOC from a Stanford Professor and was knowledgeable about what was happening. However, my challenge was to tell him that his role is much more than to oversee the implementation of PeopleSoft and ensuring that the organization moves towards a campus management system and an ERP.

The role of CIO is now that of a person who monitors the changing trends in the industry and not just in a particular industry but all around. The next challenge to your organization may be from a very different player that you may not have thought about. Who would have thought that Telenor with EasyPaisa would be a threat to the Western Union and a Commercial inter-bank transfer.

The other challenge is to understand that the employees may be more expert in the technology than even the IT workers. Their knowledge and expertise in particular areas may surpass that of the expertise in the IT department. They would probably be more interested in selecting for themselves  the particular application and features. A role that was previously with the CIO. This power will now go the consumer departments. There is more democratization of the power. Functional features and their ownership and requirements would now be the domain of the consumer departments.

The other is that CIO may be the person looking at the big picture involving non-functional features such as integration, scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, extensibility, performance etc.

As you can see from the topics of the sessions in this summit the issues now involve organization wide data and its long term use. The existence of the organization in the virtual domain, very well termed now as the cloud. We will now all be living in the cloud. The days of living on the earth where our feets are firmly planted on the ground are over. Our existence and our future is now up in the clouds.

The bargaining power of the CIO now has to change. He must be able to articulate the non-functional requirements of the various “ity”-s in the form of business strategy and business terminology. These non-functional “ity”-requirements include reliability, extensibility, maintainability, modularity, testability, availability, etc.  He needs to be the owner of the virtual existence of the company. The designer of the virtual existence of the organization in the cloud and owners of the expertise and knowledge of the organization in the form of big data.

See Also:

• Computer Revolution and Moore's Law: A Personal Journey
• Big Data, Management Transformation and Voyager of Star Trek Movie
• Changing Role of CIO
• Why are there no IT companies with more than 10,000 employees
• Beauty is Our Business - Mathematics, Excellence and the Great Dijkstra

Why are there no IT companies with more than 10,000 employees

Why are there no IT companies with more than 10,000 employees

In a speech made by Dr. Ishrat Husain, Dean IBA at the CIO Summit on May 21, 2013, he asked the question why is it that we do not have in Pakistan any IT company similar to WIPRO or InfoSys of India. We do not even have an IT company with more than 10,000 employees. He raised this question following an impressive talk by Dr. Ata ur Rahman outlining the great and wonderful work he had done as Minister of S&T and as Chairman HEC in jump starting the telecommunication revolution and development of policies that have improved R&D.

Beauty is Our Business - Mathematics, Excellence and the Great Dijkstra

I remember here the lessons Dijkstra gave about beauty and excellence through personal examples. His colleagues celebrated his works with the salute: "Beauty is Our Business"[1]. Dijkstra is one of the most revered computer scientist whose footprint on the fundamental ideas in computer science is now legendary.

This was 1988-89. I was at The University of Texas at Austin, USA when my friend and colleague Mobashir R Hingorjo (who later became the founding director of TPS) came up to me and said let's take this course "Capita Selecta" by Edsgar Dijkstra. I had read about Dijkstra in computer science texts but had no idea what Capita Selecta meant. I showed my concern to Mobashir about how would this course be relevant to my direction of research, which was more towards software engineering, and less towards formal (mathematical) verification of programs. To this argument, Mobashir had a simple answer "Trust me. One day we will be telling people that we took this course by Dijkstra!" 

I had no intention of pursuing verification and mathematical correctness of programs, hence, I was less interested in the course contents and more interested in Dijkstra himself. I had taken the course on a non-credit basis to shield myself from any adverse grade that I may be awarded by this guru of computer science. We thus found ourselves in this Capita Selecta class of Dijkstra and what a memorable experience it was! This interaction with Dijkstra eventually became a profound lesson in my conception of beauty and my understanding of what it means to strive for excellence, and this I would always cherish.

I now often  share the following anecdotes with my students and to those I am trying to explain the concept of excellence. 

One day Dijkstra was writing an algorithm on the board. As he came down to the bottom end of the board, he found himself short of space. He had one line more to write and had run out of space at the bottom of the board. He had the option either to write the remaining line on the right hand side of the board which was blank or he could use the other slideable board on the right that could have slid on top of the first one. But, what did he do? He chose to rub all the lines of the algorithm that he had written, and then rewrote all the lines once again, but this time a little smaller, so that the remaining last line would also fit on a single page of the board. From top to bottom. No need for the line spilling over to another side of the board and becoming orphan. I wondered at that time what is this. Why is he wasting time. Now I know better. He was giving us a fundamental lesson in aesthetics and beauty. This effort invested in making your work proportional, balanced and visually appealing is the essence of the strive for excellence for those for whom beauty is their business. 

I remember one day his saying to us that he had never written a program that is more than a page long! I often wondered then what kind of programming he was doing. It was much later, after my software house venture failed that I learned the hard way; that any program (or function or procedure) that is more than a page long should be thrown away. On his authority, and my adverse experience of the tremendous loss that we incurred in the software house venture, I can safely say that one of the best methods of software quality assurance is that we should throw away any routine (or program) that can not be put succinctly on a page, better still half a page!

Add to this Dijkstra's conception of beautiful expression in the style and structure of the program and you have the most powerful quality control tool for programming. I think one is better off just throwing away a program that is not beautifully written with balanced and concise names. This is much easier than Fagan's Inspection Method which is a more technical implementation of the same idea. A program that can not be easily read is an expression of convoluted and imprecise thinking and should be immediately discarded. Trust me, I learned it the hard way.

I also recall the effort that Dijkstra would invest in coming up with short and very brief names of variables so that the reader can concentrate on the structure of algorithm and not get lost in the wilderness of long names. The strive for coming up with names and their prefixes would often take major amount of time. But the result of this effort was an elegant system of notation which had simplicity, brevity and directness often not witnessed in other areas of computer science. His remarks on the use of imprecise and loose language used in papers were scathing, ruthless and some of his lampooning of bad style is now legendary. See for example this analysis of Dijkstra of a document. If the imprecise and loose language used in reports and papers needs to be stringently criticised, then one can imagine what high standards are required in writing clean and neat algorithms and programs. His algorithms are supreme examples of beauty, elegance, and conciseness and so are the algorithms designed by his colleagues and students.

In another semester I was taking a class on Distributed Systems by Professor Mohammad Gouda, who was one of Dijkstra's true disciples. At the start of each class Prof Gouda would take several minutes to divide the board into three equidistant areas each separated by a vertical line drawn with chalk. He would take forever to make sure that the lines were vertical. Would rub a line many times and would draw the line again and again and would view the line from every direction until he was satisfied that his hand-drawn line was perfectly vertical, balance and dividing the board in equidistant areas. I wondered at that time, why was he wasting his time and ours. But, now I know. This must have been a lesson passed on by Dijkstra to his student and a true reflection of what is meant to have beauty as our business. Excellence is not an act but a Habit as mentioned by Aristotle, but I saw it in the example of Dijkstra and his students. Habit of excellence in every thing that we should do; whether it is making an algorithm fit on a page or whether it is drawing a line on the board. 

He was dead against the use of word processors, for the simple reason that they encourage shoddy thinking. You write first and then think later. All this ease of editing, cutting, pasting, revising and readjusting in word processors is at the expense of deep and precise thinking and should, therefore, be discouraged. I remember there was this colloquium in which the famous Donald Knuth ("Art of Computer Programming" and Tex/LaTex word processor) was making a presentation and it fell upon his old friend E W Dijkstra to introduce him. I was astounded to hear Dijkstra taking this opportunity to criticise Knuth for endangering beautiful and precise thinking with his word processing software. No wonder he was probably the only computer science researcher whose handwritten manuscripts were accepted for publications by journals for example see this wonderful paper. Just imagine the time, effort, pre-thinking and planning required in composing a handwritten page without crossing out sentences, overwriting and corrections. Think about the time we spend and the number of times we enter, cross out, revise, edit and re-edit a single line that we write using an editor/wordprocessor. Even with the help of spellers and what not, our writing is full of mistakes. There is a great deal to be learned about this maxim "think before you leap" that we have forgotten and continue to ignore when we write.

I will relate about what grade I got in this course in a later blog "Fairness in Grading: A lesson by Dijkstra"

Dijkstra Posts:

• Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
• "How can we explain Edsger W. Dijkstra to those who didn't know him?"
• Dijkstra and his contributions

References:

Please note that the title of this blog is taken from the following conference:

[1] Beauty is our Business: A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra, Texts and Monographs in Computer Science is published by Springer-Verlag, 1990, Editors: Feijen, W.H.J., A.J.M. van Gasteren, D. Gries, and Jayadev Misra.

See Also:

• Motivation: Why PhD?

What is PhD?

• What does it Mean to Have a PhD: Myths of Specialization and Departmental Expertise 
• What is the Difference between MS/MPhil Research and PhD Research

Why PhD is Difficult: 

• Why PhD is Difficult to Complete and Why there are so many ABDs and PhD Dropouts
• How Progress of Research is related to the Mood and Psychology of a PhD Student

Starting with your PhD

• Am I ready for MPhil/PhD Research: Self Checklist 
• How to Select an MPhil/PhD Research Topic

Reading Research and Writing your Research

• How to Read a Research Paper and Extract Problem Statement and Thesis Statement
• How Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation Presents the State of the Art: Synthesis vs Listing
• What is a Problem Statement and its role in MS-PhD Research
• What is a Thesis Statement and its Role in PhD-MS Research
• What is meant by Rigor of PhD Research
• Beauty is Our Business - Mathematics, Excellence and the Great Dijkstra
• Conclusion vs Assumption in Research Writing- Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis
• PhD is about Pursuit of Excellence. Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples

Qualitative Learning from a PhD

• Myth: Impact Factor Measures Real Impact
• Pursuit of Excellence vs Guzara: How to teach excellence through everyday examples
• Discerning the Forest from the Trees - The Insights from my PhD Supervisor JC Browne
• A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan's Mind-Maps
• Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra
• Lesser known dimensions of US Universities - Archives of history and literature

• Myth: We are backward because we Lag Behind in Science and Technology 
• Myth: Mushrooming of HEIs in Pakistan
• Myth: Impact factor measures impact
• Myth: Increase in PhDs Increase Teaching Quality
• What is a PhD and What is its Definition

• Best Visualization of Bachelors vs Masters vs PhD that I have seen
• What is a Thesis Statement!
• 101 Tips for Completing your PhD Quickly
• Myths of Schooling and Education: Resources
• 5 Myths of Higher Education in Pakistan