Science Fiction, The Feeling of Power, and Where are the Holes?
Science Fiction
When I was growing up, there as not a time when I did not have a book in my hands and reading. One of my favs was science fiction, another was the Civil War, and then the classics. I stumbled upon a short story about futuristic fighter pilots. The issue to the story being it was an even battle between to waring nations. No one could gain the upper hand as computers determined the tactics only to be countered by other computers. One pilot figured out how to counter the other sides tactics with a calculator and pads of paper and a pencil to which the opposing computer could not calculate a counter. Humans think freely and computers follow a routine. I looked for more of the authors stories and could not find more. I had thought I had a brief or preface to a longer story.
Instead, the search led me to Isaac Asimov’s science fiction and the story, “The Feeling of Power.” Enjoyable and too short for me to let my mind wander. It was from Asimov’s story, the other author had created his science fiction story.
The Feeling of Power . . .
In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.
The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed “Graphitics”.
The discovery is demonstrated to senior programmer Shuman, who realizes the value of it. But it is appropriated by the military establishment, who use it to re-invent their understanding of mathematics. They also plan to replace their computer-operated ships with lower cost, more expendable (in their opinion) crewed ships and manned missiles, to continue the war.
Aub is so upset by the appropriation of his discovery for military purposes that he commits suicide, aiming a protein depolarizer at his head and dropping instantly and painlessly dead. As Aub’s funeral proceeds, his supervisor realizes that even with Aub dead, the advancement of Graphitics is unstoppable. He executes simple multiplications in his mind without help from any machine, which gives him a great feeling of power.
Another story gets closer to what I am saying.
Where are the Holes? Taken from Bullet Holes.
Excerpt from “How Not to Be Wrong.” Jordan Ellenberg in brevity!
“When we made recommendations,” W. Allen Wallis, the director, wrote, “frequently things happened. Fighter planes entered combat with their machine guns loaded according to Jack Wolfowitz’s (Paul’s dad)recommendations about mixing 5 types of ammunition, and maybe the pilots came back or maybe they didn’t. Navy planes launched rockets whose propellants had been accepted by Abe Girshick’s sampling-inspection plans, and maybe the rockets exploded and destroyed our own planes and pilots or maybe they destroyed the target.”
So here’s the question. You don’t want your planes to get shot down by enemy fighters, so you armor them. But armor makes the plane heavier, and heavier planes are less maneuverable and use more fuel. Armoring the planes too much is a problem; armoring the planes too little is a problem. Somewhere in between there’s an optimum. The reason you have a team of mathematicians socked away in an apartment in New York City is to figure out where that optimum is.
The military came to the SRG with some data they thought might be useful. When American planes came back from engagements over Europe, they were covered in bullet holes. But the damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.
It is pretty obvious; the fuselage should be the reinforced with more armor. Except the sample was taken from planes which returned. What happened to the planes which did not return?
The armor, said Wald, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are. It goes where the bullet holes aren’t: on the engines due to the numbers of planes not returning.
Wald’s insight was simply to ask: where are the missing holes? The ones that would have been all over the engine casing, if the damage had been spread equally all over the plane? Wald was pretty sure he knew. The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes.
The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back. Whereas the large number of planes returning to base with a thoroughly Swiss-cheesed fuselage is pretty strong evidence that hits to the fuselage can (and therefore should) be tolerated. If you go to the recovery room at the hospital, you’ll see a lot more people with bullet holes in their legs than people with bullet holes in their chests. But that’s not because people don’t get shot in the chest; it’s because the people who get shot in the chest don’t recover.
My $.02
Mind you, I am a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt which I attained in 2008 while amongst a room full of engineers. We were out of work and the state paid for the training. This I found to be advantageous to do as it added to the attractiveness of employing me and expanded on my statistical application knowledge base.
I m a lowly MA who worked in supply chain and knew lead times were often rife with too much time due to safe planning, inventory safety stock, material flow in manufacturing, just in case, etc. I am very much at home on the shop floor. If you understand your supply base, your shop floor, and your customers; you can draw the right conclusions better than a computer which is rigid in solutions.
It is not the first-time computerization has been applied. With the creation of MRP by Oliver Wight and Walter Goddard, people within companies were able to strategize demand against inventory and production capacity. Rudimentary in design, it was the beginning of systematic planning of product. The simple design led to advanced capabilities. The overriding factor in the system was human intervention. People still had to review and approve the input and output.
Yep, AI is coming to town. Get ready for the circus. Human intervention is still needed because AI will not think like humans or interpret correctly.
A1? What is that?
@Eric,
I think he means AI.
Yep . . .
Operations research expanded in WW II. The British used it for a variety of “problems”. US as well! The first ‘computer’ in Cambridge mass…..
The story about armoring decisions is famous among students of the origins.
Military aircraft design always starts with a weight budget…. the trades and compromises that go along in the design “life”….
I have been told the A-10 ejection seat sits in an armor “bucket” to protect the pilot…..
Also two engine fighters have higher mission reliability and return home probabilities, but have more weight, more maintenance, and so more support costs. The trade offs!
This is why US Navy went with 2 engine F-18, and why I cannot agree with the carrier version of F-35.
In the early 1990’s I took a course not related to OR or Six Sigma, but taught by a man who worked in W Edwards Deming’s ‘circle’.
Deming would have his students take a 10 slotted paddle and use it so sieve 10 balls out of a bowl with 90 white balls and 10 red.
He would chastise the students for not regularly getting 9 to 1 ratios.
Then explain the difference between a system issue and a random occurrence….
Deming was convinced US management sciences needed reform, and worked well into old age on making it happen.
Peter Drucker (Managing for Results; Practice of Management; et al) did some good work despite his conservative politics and admiration of Joseph Schumpeter with simultaneous disdain for John Maynard Keynes. Eventually in the 90’s, then Drucker wised up and quit corporate consulting and founded Leader to Leader Institute for non-profit management; which I take to be his penance for decades of sinful corporatism. Despite his feelings of guilt, nothing has shown me that he ever really understood the corrupting coalition of management incentives, power, and anti-social behavior or how it might be ameliorated.
Ian Mitroff (Dirty Rotten Strategies:..) also did some good work and has proven to be marginally more enlightened.
My own OR work was entirely in the workload management of large computer systems; a piece of cake since it mostly excludes the human factor. The one human factor that still applied was that “work expands to fill all available capacity.”
paddy:
Deming was convinced US management
sciencesneeded reform, and worked well into old age on making it happen.There were times (many? I am not sure anymore and a distant past), I would be asked how I accomplished something when there was a shortage of capacity, time, or materials. The answer to such was knowing how the information was gathered, processed, and what it represented. The validity of it was paramount to manufacturing. Getting off your butt and going to see paid dividends on my knowledge base. It was only then; I could mostly understand. Forsaking all of this for AI is a mistake. It was done before. The results were not good.
Things have changed for sure. I got into a discussion about becoming either a CPIM or CPM. The former being in materials/production planning and the latter in Purchasing. You did your studies, attended the meetings, gathered OJ experiences, and took each test. A test might be $50., membership another $50. Now it is a business where before it was a collection of people living day to day doing an under-rated function of importance. Costs are well over a $thousand. Price does not make something worthy.
I am for continuing education, not so much certification, Many see certs as a square to fill.
I did as much course work as I was interested in. I did achieve one cert which was a ‘gate’.
Retired is great now time to learn what I should have known when doing!
I sometimes refer to an Engineering Stat text I used in 1970.
AI is only as good as its search algo’s and the data is runs over….. it can cover huge data sets.
paddy:
Ours was testing to see what you already know. It enhanced your presenting yourself as capable by saying you know the basics. You still have to learn the new environment.
Bill,
“The answer to such was knowing how the information was gathered, processed, and what it represented.”
Yep, even computers have their secrets:<) Honestly though, data collection of resource and workload metrics comes as an afterthought (if at all), except where those metrics represent billable units. Then there is that old POV thingy that often befuddles even the best intentions of system programmers; IOW where something actually occurs is not always where it is measured.
The problem with AI is that it is naive enough to believe what it reads.
Ron:
I would prefer to keep it that way as we can always change course if it lets us or does not overrule us.
Programming note: unless the post is labeled “Open Thread,” please make your comments on-topic or they will be deleted.
There’s so much interesting sci-fi out there thse days too.
Much more interesting than most econ.
The ‘3-body problem’ by Chinese author
I have put up a lot of material about AI recently. Is that the topic?
Not much of it gained much attention. AI represents the next wave of the Industrial Revolution, and will have profound effects on society, as long as that lasts, ‘going forward’.
Or is it to be about old Asimov stories?
Delete away. Or put up a fresh ‘Open Thread’ topic.
@Dobbs,
You started the post I deleted by acknowledging it was off-topic. Obviously, you know the difference.
Science fact:
India has successfully put their lander on the moon.
AP: India was counting down to landing a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole Wednesday — an unchartered territory that scientists believe could hold important reserves of frozen water and precious elements.
A lander with a rover inside was orbiting before attempting to touch down on the lunar surface, creating an agonizing wait for India’s space scientists in the southern city of Bengaluru. India is making its second attempt in four years to join the United States, the Soviet Union and China in achieving the landmark.
India unexpectedly got into a race with Russia, which had planned to land its Luna-25 spacecraft in the same lunar region on Monday. But Luna-25 crashed into the moon after it spun into an uncontrolled orbit. It would have been the first successful Russian lunar landing after a gap of 47 years. Russia’s head of the state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos attributed the failure to the lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research that followed the last Soviet mission to the moon in 1976. …
NY Times: Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon. ,,,
NY Times: ,,, India managed to outdo a nation (Russia/USSR) that put the first satellite, man and woman in space is a measure of the country’s long embrace of the science and technology needed to support a space program. …
(Also, land the first 2 probes on the lunar surface, in 1959.)
Fred:
I said I would try to put up an open thread every 4 days. For you to be so forward in your desire to do whatever, bothers me. Dan and I tried to accommodate people’s desires. We try . . . My friend Dan is gone and he died in pain from cancer in hospice. He was my friend and I will always remember him as such. He sits alongside those of my Army and Marine friends who I served with and who died in a needless war.
One request Dan made of me as he was losing cognitive ability was to keep Angry Bear alive. This came after I asked what he wanted me to do. Right now, my priorities are to keep Angry Bear going by paying the costs of a server and fixing the program of some of the things which disappeared while installing Google Analytics. That was costly, Dan paid for it, $750 to install it. That is how much he loved this place and its “old stories.”
There is a thread in that post and apparently, you failed to pick up on it or are deliberately being obtuse. AI is not the 100% fix or the 100% answer. The greatest computers during our existence “is us.” Systems are only good and provide the right answers if there is human input to them.
I know you are not happy with some things, but do not demand of us for Open Threads to be put up. If you do not like a rather rough commentary of mine, nobody is forcing you to comment to it. Fred, you are a good person. Don’t make things difficult right now.
India managed to outdo a nation (Russia/USSR) that put the first satellite, man and woman in space is a measure of the country’s long embrace of the science and technology needed to support a space program….
[ This is a ridiculously spiteful passage, having nothing to do with actual journalism. That India was successful in the attempt is an excellent accomplishment and there will be more to come, but so there will be other successes by other nations and the hope is that all learn from each other. ]
Fred:
As I have made it known, at any time, you may write an article. You have a brain. Your conversations are sharp. Crickets . . .
Let me add to this:
I can C&P with the best of them. I am confined somewhat to such presently. I lost my friend just a short while ago, am struggling with keeping AB going and covering costs, and you threaten me with leaving AB. Sad state of affairs . . .