FYI: Knob Creek just announced their "Single Barrel Reserve".
http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-...
“OK, but there are two rules…”
71–75 of 75 posts
Re: “OK, but there are two rules…”
#72Mr. Swan misses the point here. The success of the new bourbon was not because random restrictions were applied (e.g. Open a pizza place with NO CHAIRS), but because a high standard was enforced.
I don't know....a "makers mark single barrel" would have had pretty high standards and a really "me too" feel. I'll stick by my argument that self-imposed restrictions can really help people get innovative and avoid the me-too traps of entrepreneurship.
Re: “OK, but there are two rules…”
#73It's not too hard to see why this works if you think about it as a mathematical optimization. You have a very bumpy fitness function in parameter space. When you apply arbitrary constraints on the parameters you are selecting a subspace to examine for local maxima of the fitness function. This is an easier problem to solve than the original global maximization problem.
Although you then have to solve two problems; optimizing the constraints, and then optimizing within the constraints. If I applied the arbitrary constraint that x must be an odd multiple of pi, then I'm not going to get a very good answer to trying to maximise cos(x)...
The example you gave is a degenerate case that isn't really representative of the real world situation. Making x to be an odd multiple of pi in your example is an excessive constraint on the problem. Real world problems requiring creativity exist in highly multidimensional spaces and their fitness functions often exhibit fractal behavior.
For example, let P be the set of all English-language poems of N lines, where each line is a semantically and syntactically valid expression in English and N>0. P is an incredibly huge set. We want to find solutions of high aesthetic fitness on the set P. Applying a few arbitrary constraints reduces the size of the search space but has little effect on our ability to find solutions with high aesthetic fitness. For example, we could arbitrarily restrict our search to the space of English poems with N=14, 10 syllables per line, an alternating pattern of an unstressed and stressed syllables in each line (iambic pentameter), and a rhyme pattern a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g in the terminal words of each lines. We've now drastically reduced the size of the search space such that we are now searching only the space of valid Shakespearean sonnets. However, even with our arbitrary constraints in place, we're still solving a highly unconstrained optimization problem and the arbitrary constraints we applied don't prevent us from finding solutions of high fitness.
We could say that the bumpiness of the fitness function is fractal -- the shape of the fitness function on an arbitrary subspace resembles the shape of the fitness function taken over the whole space, providing that the subspace is itself "large" in some sense. The point is that there's nothing special about the arbitrary constraints we imposed. We could instead choose to work in the space where N=16, the number of words per line is between 4 and 7, the first four lines are all questions, and the last line is constructed in the form of a direct object followed by a subject and a verb and a repetition of the direct object (e.g. "Yoda, you seek Yoda"). There are still many aesthetic and unaesthetic solutions in this space, perhaps there are even some solutions with greater fitness than any of the 154 solutions that Shakespeare discovered with his set of arbitrary constraints.
Re: “OK, but there are two rules…”
#74I learned this concept from George Lucas when I was a child. Star Wars Budget: $13M Return of the Jedi Budget: $32M I'm not joking when I say that juxtaposition influenced the way I think about life. Now the idea almost seems like a trivial commonplace to me. Everyone from John Paul Sartre to David Heinemeier Hansson has written about it.
But the best film of the trilogy was Empire Strikes Back - at $25M.
No, $18M according to imdb.
Re: “OK, but there are two rules…”
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a myth that needs to die. Having started with a film SLR in the digital age, based on my personal experience I can say that it does not take $5000 of film or developer fees to learn f-stops or ISO settings on your camera, unless you have a spastic trigger finger. I learned the above, as well as the zone system, shutter speed, push/pull processing, metering, and night shooting using about 5-6 rolls of film. I…
I pulled a number out of my ass, but I was also accounting for my time . I was also referring not just to fstops but the entire process of learning to take good photos which takes more than 5 or 6 rolls of film, composition and such can take an unbounded amount of time to learn. I do not care enough about the "certain joy" of darkrooms to spend money on it. I am not and have no intention of being "A Photographer . Di…
Chill, buddy. If you simplified your original statement to the point where it is no longer true, responses to it that are off base can hardly be surprising. Say what you mean, mean what you say.