Rota is sort of the RP Feynman of mathematics; his "Indiscrete Thoughts" was probably the best thing I read in 2019; I recommend it to anyone who enjoys two fisted tales of applied math.
Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
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Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#22These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There still exist relicts of this system in the academia. With increasing emancipat…
> Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates?
For me the Nobel Prize was greatly diminished in 2014 when the Nobel committee lost all credibility.
The inventor of the LED Nick Holonyak, Jr. didn't win a Nobel Prize but in 2014 the inventors of the blue LED did; Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura.
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#23"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and
large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time
you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test
it against each of your twelve problems to see
whether it helps.”
Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year old board game design diary I had written, and came upon an old idea that I had put on the backburner after the prototype played just "ok". I tried to come up with ways to fix it for awhile, and the ideas I had then were so different they morphed into completely different designs (more specifically, it morphed into 1 different design, which bombed in playtesting, and then that morphed into a totally different design, which did really well in playtesting and I showed to publishers, and then reflecting on their feedback resulted in a completely new design sparking in my head).
I thought about the problem for a few more seconds, and one new thing to try popped into my head, not a totally different game this time still keeping with the core mechanism, but a different method how players were given and used the cards, and I dug into it a bit more, and I decided on a different method of point distribution for the cards, and then thought a bit more, and the thought of adding abilities that encourage comboing based one previous or next cards played popped into my head, and then I decided to run with it, came up with a new prototype, tried it out, and it felt at least three times better, and felt more like a game that could be published.
I have a game that is currently a finalist in a game design contest whose design had remained dormant for over a year because I was unsatisfied with it, but something made me think about it again and a new mechanism popped in my head and I tried that and felt a lot better about it.
The Feynman method works for me, at least when it comes to designing board games. I don't mind shelving game designs for a long period of time anymore, since I have had so much luck with just thinking about them again every once in awhile and fresh new ideas popping into my head to improve the game, that likely wouldn't have happened if I kept forcing myself to think about that game.
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#24These hints reminded me that we don't have "great scientists" anymore. Can you list recent Nobel Prize laureates? Great scientists were basically people-institutions and all the mundane and scrupulous work was done by assistants, doctoral candidates, technicians, as we have an example of Hilbert and some much less known mathematician. There still exist relicts of this system in the academia. With increasing emancipat…
I suspect that age has something to do with it (and he even alluded to that in his last point)
Lots of great scientists are not recognized until the body of their work has had enough time to be recognized and stand out.
so known "great scientists" are old or gone, but maybe we are surrounded by future great scientists but only notice the youtubers.
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#25I wonder how the "Publish the Same Result Several Times" recommendation ties into the "publish or perish"-mantra. I suspect that 1997 was a different time. Many academics have a super-human publication cadence, not so much because of all the new knowledge they've extracted from the universe but because they aggressively re-publish their existing results. Very low read- and citation counts are common implications. Fro…
One professor of mine talked about the LPU, the least publishable unit that is sufficient for a paper.
Even has a wikipedia page, which also mentions "salami publishing"...:
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#26"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year o…
RUMINATING!
I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own. But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a whole swath of unrelated mammals have come to solve the process of digestion of rough food material. And, if we consider thoughts, ideas, and problems to be rough material then I think the word works perfectly.
I'd heard of Feynman's process, but for some reason never thought to assign it this very appropriate word. Thanks for the inspiration and reminder. Best of luck on the game! Please Show HN when you can share it. :)
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#27Could we put "Rota" in the title? It's currently not even clear from the title that this is about mathematics, let alone that it's written by an expert and highly opinionated mathematician.
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#28"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year o…
> Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.
Drag-net thinking? ;)
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#29"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year o…
RUMINATING! I just watched a bunch of Marvin Minsky lectures about his theory of the Society of Mind. One of his early questions was (paraphrased) "With all these words for emotions where are the words for thinking?" He eventually popped the ones he'd found up on the board. And, of course, I sketched up some of my own. But nowhere in either of those lists was the quite apropos reference to how a whole swath of unrela…
I love the metaphor of digestion to describe the brain's process. I once tried explaining to a friend how my brain works on problems in the background and they looked at me like I was spouting some new-age nonsense.
Re: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1997) [pdf]
#30"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.” Basically just did this again this week. I was re-reading a three year o…
> You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.
I have lived by those words for many years, but somehow I was never able to find where I had initially read them (yes I tried googling, somehow that quote doesn't show up!)
This works very well, especially if you are involved in research and hobbies in very varied area. For example in running you will learn about interval training - alternating short burst of training interspersed with rest periods. What about using that when training neural networks? How does this map to game design, when you put high intensity on the player for short burst of time? How is it similar with the pomodoro technique? Obviously you end up with many spurious connections but it can light up certain topics in a different light.