A fly kept bugging me in the coffee shop. Now I’m writing this.
I was in my favorite spot, Caje on Haley Street, doing some work, and a bug kept coming up to my ear. I was annoyed as to why it would only attempt to go at me, but I looked around and realized why. I was sitting right next to the window.
I watched the bug for a minute and saw it keep trying to break free into the open world, scaling up and down the window, trying to find its way out. To us, it seems idiotic. We know it’s a window. We know it just gives the illusion of being outside without actually being outside, a transparent piece of glass. But to the bug, it was an invisible barrier, something it was unable to get past.
I watched it struggle, and finally I thought, how could I help? My immediate solution was to block it off and force it to go outside, guiding its path in that direction. But I quickly realized that wouldn’t work because 1. You can’t block off all open space, and 2. Embarrassment. I was in a coffee shop and would look weird trying to guide a bug outside.
Funny enough, though, the bug did find its way outside. It kept exploring, kept hitting the window until it found the door. And it was off and gone to enjoy its three-month life.
It reminded me of a concept I was learning in my AI class. Don’t let the name fool you; we’re just learning the math behind “intelligence,” and a concept that came up was uninformed vs. informed algorithms.
Now, to start, an algorithm is merely a way for a computer program to find information. Think of it like putting a mouse in a maze and having it find a piece of cheese. For the mouse, it would just think its way through, but because robots don’t have minds, we make algorithms to help them think through it.
Now, within these algorithms, there are the two types I mentioned before.
Uninformed algorithms are algorithms in which the mouse has no prior information on where it should be going. Imagine a large circle, with the mouse placed in the middle and the cheese placed in the southernmost part of it. The mouse has to randomly explore every part of the maze to find the cheese. It could be very quick if it happens to go in the right direction, or it could take the maximum amount of time by exploring every other spot before the one where the cheese is.
Then there’s the one I want to focus on: informed algorithms.
These algorithms give the mouse a much better chance of finding the cheese. Instead of searching willy-nilly, informed algorithms make the search space much smaller, so the mouse has a clearer focus on where to go. Instead of the whole circle, it might cut the circle into a quarter slice, and that’s the space where the mouse should be going.
Clearly, informed algorithms are much better.
But within informed algorithms, there are still hierarchies as to which has the best heuristic, which is the fancy way of saying which is the better cheat sheet to inform the mouse on where to go.
The best among them being A*, which, instead of cutting the circle into a quarter slice, turns it into a straight pipe, taking the mouse from where it’s at to the cheese.
It involves a lot of math and calculating, and a lot of checks to measure whether it’s an admissible heuristic. Most of the effort is spent defining and validating a good heuristic. But once all the checks are passed, you will have a pretty good algorithm, and the mouse won’t take that long to get to the cheese, wasting a bunch of its life going in all the wrong directions.
Which reminded me of a conversation I previously wrote about with Alvaro Daniel Cagüeñas Hernandez, where he stated that a life with God is a straight line, but our own chosen life is a winding path that circles back on itself and leads to nothing. He concluded by saying, “Trust in God, and you won’t regret it.”
Much like the heuristic.
Which is fair. He’s a Christian and has had a good life, but is the God of the Bible the best way?
We have already concluded that an informed algorithm is better than an uninformed one. A life of faith vs. a life without faith. But that then begs the question: which is the best heuristic?
All these different faiths and ways of life. Which is the best? Which is truly the one to follow?
I’m willing to bet my life on the one where a man rose from the dead and came back to life.
Because any good heuristic algorithm has to prove itself, and we have been given a book proving the greatness of the God of the Bible through the stories of the Old Testament.
Not to say the other faiths aren’t valid, but they’re not the best heuristic, in my opinion.
Like Jesus says, look at the fruits.
This heuristic has shown me the most fruits.
Back to the fly.
In our lives, we are so blind to the invisible barriers and spend so much time trying to force our heads through a window when the simple path was two feet away. But we are led by our sight and not by our faith.
For our God knows our blockers. What we think are pathways are windows, and yet we keep trying. But in humility, we must come to Him and let Him guide us toward the correct path.
The one that doesn’t look like a path.
Walking by faith.
Wait, there’s more. The fly flew back inside. He fell from faith and started charting his own path again, and once again ended up in the same problem. So I killed him and called it blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. A topic for next time.