The power of stories

This morning I woke up with a few interesting realizations about why stories are important and why games are important:

1. Stories shape our world. Everyone learns about how this world functions by one type of story or another. In each culture, there are usually tales & lores passed down from generations ago. In our daily life we hear stories from friends and relatives about who did what that bring out what results, and we would caution ourselves or improve our own behaviors based on them. In some way, perspectives, values, political or religious affinities are also certain types of stories (“God loves us all,” “bosses are manipulative,” “work hard and you'll be successful”). And we watch the events in the world go by to either reaffirm our existing theories/stories about the world, or sometimes, learn new ones. Some people have optimistic stories about life, people, or just about anything, while for others, they're always the victims of bad environment, bad people, or bad luck. Stories powerfully shape our understanding, and subsequently, actions in this world.
2. Stories define power balance. It might be argued that there are three types of people: story-generators, story-tellers, and story-listeners. Story-generators are the stories themselves, they are the contents and topics of the stories, their actions and deeds become what people will pass around and talk about. They're usually the heroes or villains in a story context. The retired soldier who bravely saved a man off the subway rail, the Internet start-up that made a big fortune, the dictator prosecuted by international court. Story-tellers are those who pass, re-make, or re-tell stories to others. In the old agricultural life, they might have been the elders in town who always attracted a gathering after dinner, telling distant tales. In today's societies, they're the news-reporters, film-makers, book-writers, and increasingly, I would say, the game-developers. Story-listeners are just about everyone else, the you and me who read the news at breakfast, watch the movies on weekends, or listen to a friend at work. It might be observed too, that many of the story-generators are the role-models or winners in society -- the rich, the powerful, the influential, or the inspiring. Many of the story-tellers also hold above-average income or power in our society (think about the money and fame of Hollywood actors/actresses, the power of the producers and directors, or the people involved in TV and news productions). While most of the story-listeners are consumers who spend their hard-earn cash to listen to or watch new stories in life, real or fictional.
3. Games are the new story-media. The oldest stories are being told in the oral tradition, and many stories are still delivered orally today, although story-telling has changed dramatically with the introduction of new technologies: newspapers, radios, TVs, and movies. But beginning in the 80s', a new and possibly unparalleled medium was born: computer and video games. While games come in different flavors, many types of games contain story-lines and character developments. As games are often both audio and visual, it makes them more approachable to stimulus-seeking people (especially the young). But most importantly, the participatory nature of games bring a new level of power and control never before seen in any story-telling medium, where the story-listener, for the first time, may also act, contribute, and decide, how the story will unfold. Although most game-stories are still linear, increasing trends made possible by new technologies are making games more non-linear, complex, life-like, engaging, and empowering. If seen as a new medium to story-telling, we might then be able to explain its natural appeal to people -- because we've always been interested and willing to listen or see a good story, now the chance to be the heroes? Wow! :)

So this brings up some interesting question: will democratizing game productions (developments, and distributions) tilt the power balance? Or put another way, what will happen if the power to create and distribute games, which may very well be the most powerful story-medium to-date, is being distributed to the masses?

Some analogies might be made with the movies and news industries. With the rising popularity of blogs and Internet, some may argue that news agencies no longer control the creations and distributions of news of interest. However, although camcorders allow just about anyone to make short videos, so far popular movies are still made by big-budget studios as opposed to small teams or individuals (but perhaps YouTube has changed somewhat of that?) So what happens if game creation and distribution tools are also accessible and affordable enough to anyone with interest? Can it be done? Will it be done? And what will that mean to the traditional power balance between the story-generators, story-tellers, and the story-listeners?

When Will 3D Cyberspace Be Ready?

I've been constantly pondering on the question of how a commonly usable 3D cyberspace might be created on the current Internet. There are of course many technical and social issues involved, but a pretty basic question is: can it be done at all?

My answer to that question now, is more towards the 'yes' (of course, how else will I make meaning out from my current existence. ;) Just a matter of to which degree. To answer this question in a more objective way, we will need to look at three basic factors: 1) can 3D graphics support the cyberspace we want to make? 2) is the processing power enough? And 3) do we have the sufficient bandwidth?

Considering the myriad of 3D games on the market today, the answer is definitely 'yes' to the first two questions. And consider the success of MMOG, the answer to 3) is also partially 'yes'. I put it as 'partial' because MMOG is not yet universally usable by the majority of computer users.

So what needs to be done to make 3D worlds more ubiquitous? It's fairly safe to say that, as long as all the 3D contents are on a user's computer, engaging 3D worlds can be generated without much problem, so the main issue really is, whether the 3D contents can be delivered to users computers, in real-time.

I have the following predication, about when 3D cyberspace will become common: it's when the amount of data necessary to generate an interactive scene at a given moment can be downloaded with a given bandwidth on the common user's computer.

To put that in perspective, a friend who's making game told me that, a simple 3D scene might require about 5MB of content to render, yet, most user's broadband is probably still in the 256kbps (32KB / sec) or less range. SecondLife (a social MMOG based on 3D streaming) currently uses only around 70-80 kbps on average, and 100kbps maximal for bandwidth, according to its CEO Philip Rosedale. Obviously we probably wouldn't need all 5MB all at once, but given a maximum of 100kbps of bandwidth, you still need around 400 seconds (that is, more than 5 minute) to download a 5MB content. But say for example, we would like to enter a new virtual world within 10 seconds, that makes our bandwidth requirement to be 4000kbps or 4Mbps. So in this secnario, the predication would be that when over 4Mbps of bandwidth becomes common, the infrastructure will then be ready for universal 3D cybersapce.

The average bandwidth in South Korea, last time I checked was mostly between 2-8 Mbps. So perhaps we aren't really that far off.

A theory for Fundamentalness

Today I had a new theory while thinking about some problems: that behind every problem, there are some fundamental issues/aspects that will be relevant to a wide number of other problems/issues.

The reason I thought of this idea, was that I've been thinking and trying to understand: why some research are considered as more important / influential than others?

Of course, there are some common-sense answers to this question, such as: the work is the first of its kind (field-setter); the result is applicable to a wide range of problems; it solves some long-standing, difficult issues; it provides a simple theory to complex phenomena that either explain the mechanism well, or allow us to make better predications, etc.

There's also the joke that, the importance of a scientific work is judged by whether your name is spelled with lower case letters as opposed to upper cases. For example, newton, joule, watts, etc. (they're the units for force, energy, and electricity).

Today, there are more metrics/tools for accessing the degree of influence/importance of one's research work, and one such tool is the number of citations to one's work, indicated by metrics such as the Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and the recently launched Google Scholar.

But upon closer examinations, one may find that this subject can be highly controversial and there are no simple or straightforward answers.

For one, while citation may indicate the interests or relevance of a work in the past few years or decades (since such data can be tracked by computers and databases). It will not indicate nor access the importance of a work in the coming years or decades, let alone the relevance of a work after a hundred years (the story of Mendel's chromosome theory should serve us well).

Citations might also indicate different aspects of importance, for example, SCI only indexes works that are of journal-quality papers, while Google Scholar attempts to find all references of a work available on the Internet. A famous P2P research work called Chord scores 35 citations in the 2004 SCI (which is relatively high, but works in other scientific fields have citation numbers run in the hundreds), yet its Google Scholar search result is very impressive (more than 2,500 citations, which is much higher than most scientific works). The difference is caused by the nature of computer science where most works are published in conferences/workshops as opposed to journals, and also that Google Scholar indexes not only papers published, but also that of master and PhD thesis, or technical reports. Plus the fact that computer science works have a higher likelihood of being available online and thus indexed by Google.

There's also the question of the definition of importance/relevance. While some importance are associated with fame (as in Einstein), other influential work are less well known (for example, the inventor/discoverer of laser is probably not very well-known by the public).

But I suspect that ultimately, importance, relevance, or influence is measured by how many people, or how long a period, does a work affect (of course, for people, one can also consider just the research people, or the population at large). In this sense, all the previously mentioned forms of importance / influence are broadly included (citations, fame, or range of applications)

If we can accept this loose definition for now, then the next question (at least for research people) becomes: how does one do important / relevant works?

Turing Award winner Richard Hamming had given some of his thoughts in a 1986 Bell Lab seminar "You and Your Research." But if importance is judged by how widely it is applicable to (in terms of people, duration, or tasks), then it will not be surprising to see that, in many, perhaps even all, daily problems or situations we face, there are certain aspects which a n existing important work is applicable or is in fact already applied.

Almost all of our modern home appliances, which help us to solve our daily problems, are the results of accumulations of research works and engineering efforts in the past. When we turn on the computer and browse the Internet, the underlying messages, protocols, encryptions, are all influential works done in the past, of which we're currently been influenced.

I therefore find it possible that, underlying perhaps all daily problems you face, there are some aspects or potentials that a solution (if it is not yet found) can in fact be quite influential and applicable to other problems as well.

We all know the story of Newton discovering the laws of gravity after an apple hit his head, or perhaps the story of the accidental discovery of penicillin.

Whether one actually pays attention to perhaps even the seemingly mundane/trivial problems or phenomena during a day and seeks to find some general solutions for it, is however, another issue.

Inevitability

Laws of classical physics describe how things will work in a mostly mechanical, deterministic way, absent of any unpredictability. Later theories of quantum physics make uncertainty a central aspect and concept in the physical reality they attempt to describe. For most people, the common sense is that the non-living behaves in more or less predictable fashion (like a rock falling), unless the system gets complicated (like weather). However, when living beings are in discussion (like humans), things become unpredictable again, especially with the behaviors of people.

However, macroeconomics and psychology have been attempting to draw theories/predications, even laws, on the human behaviors when they're considered collectively. The idea is that, while individual behaviors are difficult to predict, certain properties (or emergent properties) would arise when enough people are being considered. The same might also be said for the predications for physical matters (that is, while it's difficult to predict the movements of an atom, it is much more easier to predict the movement of rocks or planets, which are atoms collected in much larger quantity).

These are all well-known knowledge and views of modern day intellectuals (esp. scientists).

However, today I was pondering at the unpredictability of human behavior, and its association with free will. The issue at heart is: while individual behavior is hard to predict, I've also heard the seemingly reasonable observation that if something is technically feasible and doable, then it will eventually be made/created by man. In other words, as long as something is physically valid to do (not violating any physical laws), and there's a demand/incentive/wish by some people to do it, then it will happen, eventually. Eventuality is a key word here, indicating that certain wild ideas might not be realizable within the feasible timespan of an individual's life. However, that also means, in the long run, certain creations, if their occurrences will bring benefits to some individuals, then they will happen, no matter how difficult, how absurd, or how scary.

Some case in examples include the cloning of human beings, Star Trek-like teleporting of people to remote places (by first decomposing a person into bits of atoms), basement/garage labs capable of producing biological or nuclear weapons, or perhaps self-replicating intelligent machines that may one day replace humanity.

If, this view is true, that all things can be created, will be created eventually, then what does that mean for humanity, in the long run?

Or, perhaps due to the forces of free will, social and moral dynamics, humans will choose certain paths instead of others, will restrain themselves from doing certain destructive behaviors as opposed to performing them. Thus, in the long run, we will still be survivable.

This brings out the ultimate question that, is our future eventually fixed? Or maybe there are still different/alternative endings to the humanity story? If our ends are still open, what are the forces that will shape their directions? Or perhaps, despite all the illusions of free will and unpredictability, collective human behaviors are actually fairly predictable in the sense that we're on the path to more productions, consumptions, advanced technologies, and complexities, until perhaps one day, the entire race finally meets its end, as the Oracle in The Matrix once said: “everything that has a beginning, has an end?”

Social-phobia and Identities

A friend of mine was telling me the symptoms of being a social-phobic: difficulty in breathing, discomforts while being with a crowd. As a result, my friend usually acts as a quiet listener/observer when many people are around. Yet for my friend, it is not as difficult to express thoughts and communicate with people if these things are done over the Internet. This brings up an interesting experiment: if people with social-phobia in the real world could actually communicate and express themselves quite well in social virtual worlds such as Second Life, There, or perhaps even while playing in children-oriented virtual environments such as Disney's Toontown, then can they still be called social-phobics, or perhaps they are simply just unused to the physical aspects of human interactions, while being fully capable in engaging meaningful, perhaps even diverse modes of social interactions?

A bigger issue related to this question involves how we define ourselves and our relations with the world around us. Usually how we act, perform to expectations, or interact with others, depends not just on the external entities (people, animals, environments) involved, but also how we perceive ourselves at the moment: whether we're good or bad, pretty or ugly, smart or dumb, capable or ineffective, etc. In other words, what we do often can be the results of the interplay between our sense of identities and the external entities. It would not be surprising that once a different identity is assumed, behaviors can be dramatically different.

Yet, multiple identities are in fact not foreign to us. All of us have multiple identities at different times of the day, depending on who we're interacting with, what the social atmosphere is, or simply what moods we're having. What today's virtual worlds and related technologies offer, perhaps, are additional and more diverse ways to assume various identities and explore who we are in previously unavailable ways.

If my friend finds that social interactions in virtual worlds, perhaps even ones involving large crowds, are easily handled, we might then be able to look at other ways where traditionally undesirable personal or psychological traits, could in fact be given new meanings, with the help of new methods to explore our identities.

The Attraction of Virtual Environments

Recently I've been thinking about why computer-generated virtual environments hold such a big attraction to me.

A standard answer I've been giving out in the past few years has been “because I grew up with them.” I started to play computer games since a young age, and they were basically my childhood “toys” that defined much of the colors and joys in those early years. I was especially attracted to a number of graphic adventure games created by Sierra On-lines that focused on puzzle-solving and social interactions with computer characters. My fascination started from, and continues to be the fact that you could speak, interact, make friends with or enemies of those little computer characters living inside the virtual worlds.

This morning I had a new answer. It was also about seeking “freedom”: freedom from burdens, freedom from restrictions, and freedom from the reality. Much of what exists in our day-to-day life is about limitations and restrictions, of things we're either not allowed to do because of rules and regulations, or things we're unable to do due to lack of ability or resource. And yet, a large part of human efforts and endeavors has been to seek out and pursue the possible, or carry out and realize the potentials.

Perhaps that is why virtual environments have become more and more popular, and in some cases, addictive as well --- because it satisfies our imagination or wish to become more, more than what we usually can achieve with our little and insignificant real-world identities. Just by opening up a new game application, we can immediately assume alternative identities or suddenly transform into super-heroes. Computer games have enabled a new form of expression and a new way to explore our inner-selves that was not previously feasible or possible – it's a new type of freedom that we did not and could not have before.

However, is it really freedom? Or just escape from the reality? Or… in some way, there isn't really a distinction between the two? As freedom has always been about breaking, or transcending restrictions?

On Good and Evil

Good and Evil are the forever topics in history, life, and well, humanity. While discussions usually tend to move towards moral doctrines and judgments, I came to see it more and more as something fundamentally related to the properties of life.

I suppose that I’m a rationalist and naturalist, so I tend to seek natural explanations to everything I observe or experience, which of course, includes the issues of Good and Evil. If one makes an effort to understand what living beings are, one may agree that many forces exist to destroy the delicate state we describe as living. At the molecular level, living beings have rather organized structures that are prone to the destructive effects of radiation, mutation, or simply the second law of thermodynamics (which states that all things tend to become more chaotic over time). On a higher level, organisms are under the constant threats of sickness, predator, resource depletion, and factors that could easily change the state of being alive. At the society level, wars, inadequate social structures, anti-social behaviors, and aggressive foreign societies could also destroy the fabrics of the society and threaten the livelihoods of the people within. In short, it’s not an easy task for living things to stay living. In many ways, the existence of living organisms is indeed a miracle in this universe we are in.

And if we look closer, the concept of Good is often times associated with the living, the reproductive, the creative; while Evil is associated with the dead, the sterile, the destructive. This brings out a point: for living things, Good means to stay alive, and Evil is whatever that threatens the state of being alive.

So naturally, as living beings, we try very hard to side with Good in the fight against Evil. We try to remain alive for as much as we can, for as long as we can, as all other living beings do. In fact, this struggle probably began in Day One when the first proto-life came to exist on this Earth.

So hence the eternal struggle that we shall carry on with us, as we try to fight against all things Evil in the name of Good, for reasons most of the time, most of us do not quite understand why (however, a positive regard to Good just feels natural).

But this “why” isn’t too difficult to understand, and it can be understood without moral or supernatural explanations. Good is simply the essence of being alive, while Evil is otherwise.

In Search of Global Optimum

Many problems in science could be formulated as the search of global minimum (or maximum, but we only need to talk of one as the two are easily reversible). One such example is the protein folding problem where the goal is to find a 3D protein structure (given a 1D amino acid sequence) that has the lowest free energy. One can imagine such problem as trying to find the deepest valley in some rugged landscape, one spot at a time. Of course, the solution can be found when the size of the landscape is small, but becomes unsolvable when the landscape is vast. When it becomes unpractical to search everywhere for the optimum solution, heuristics that lead to ‘good enough’ solutions are often applied. However, one risks finding a solution that is only optimum locally instead of globally. Various methods that try to prevent the search from trapping in local minima have been devised, making it an active research area. I came to speculate recently, if our life were also like a search in such landscape, with the globally optimal solution as the “niche” best suited for a person. How many of us have actually hit that sweet spot, and how many of us are trapped in local minima? And how, if we may draw parallel from the search problem, can we utilize some heuristics to increase the chance at finding the global optimum solution?

The Arrogance of Intellect

Yesterday I went to National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) for Ph. D admission oral exam of the computer science (CS) department. By the end of it, I was disappointed, shocked, and had lost my respect for one of the professors.

The oral exam was divided into four 10-minute sections, each of which had a different focus and two professors doing the interview. My first section was on Motivation and Prospective Future Research. The young professors seemed impressed when I talked about my early research experience, my plan to build a massive simulator using peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, and the long-term goal to start up a company. That was the only section in which I felt my value as a person was appreciated.

The next two sections were on Mathematics and Information. I had been weak in math and unfamiliar with algorithm theory. So I had some difficult time answering even basic questions posed by the professors. I would be willing to take the responsibility myself, for not having studied enough the fundamentals in computing theory. However, I was unable to answer mostly because these algorithms or mathematics were unrelated to my present research, so I did not possess a good working knowledge. On the other hand, I was confident that I would be able to answer if they were relevant to my current research. However, one professor in the Mathematics section won my respect when he tried to rephrase several times the questions and provided guiding clues as to test the degree of my understanding as opposed to a simple yes/no of my ability. I could feel that he intended to teach and help a student, as opposed to intimidate or to embarrass.

The final section was on Master Thesis, in which the examinee had 5 minutes to explain his or her master thesis and 5 minutes to answer questions. Having devoted the last 2 years of my life on researching highly scalable virtual environment (VE) systems, published in the affiliated workshop of ACM SIGCOMM (one of the largest conferences in the field), and submitted a paper to IEEE Network Magazine (one of the leading journals in computer science, with an impact factor of 3.871 in 2003), I was confident of doing an interesting presentation to demonstrate my real strength: a project-based learner who has the interest and inclination to do serious and independent research.

However, much of what happened next shocked me, and I was puzzled for the rest of the day. I began the presentation by explaining that I intend to build scalable virtual environment system and defining the problem. But after I mentioned that I used P2P computing (a kind of novel networking method that has given birth to new applications used by millions of simultaneous users), the professors quickly denounced: “that’s absurd!” and “how is that possible?”

They began by saying it was “impossible” to synchronize the topology in such environment (which was in fact possible with proper control), questioning if I had done simulation or not (which I had), and asking why I made certain design decisions (which I had to admit that I probably did not answer well due to my slower response caused by the intimidation). One of the professors was opening and closing his eyes, leaning back and forth, to express his impatience as he listened to my explanations.

Then, as I explained that the topic was chosen because “P2P can potentially be more scalable than client-server architecture”, that professor quickly remarked: “P2P is the least scalable (emphasized by his tone) architecture in building large systems!”

I listened to his remark in shock, while trying to think of a response in panic. As the premise of my work was that P2P can be more scalable than client-server, if his comment was true, the value of my entire research would be invalidated. In fact, that seemed to be what the professors believed when the section ended, and their faces had the expression: “your research is ridiculous and absurd!” Though I had some diagrams in mind that might help to clarify, my time was up, and the professors wanted me out of the room, expressing no interest in listening to any further explanation.

As I walked out, it just came to me how pathetic the professor’s comment was -- not just the rudeness and unfriendliness of criticizing without an effort to understand, but because of the sheer and plain ignorance behind that comment. While P2P was, in the past, associated with a fully-connected architecture, which would not be scalable, during the past few years, research efforts from talented people have focused on building scalable P2P, where each node only connected to limited number of other nodes to avoid overloading any particular node. With the introduction of worldwide file-sharing P2P networks already used by millions of users, the scalability of P2P systems was obviously no longer questionable by any respectable researcher. A blanket statement such as “P2P is the least scalable architecture” only indicates a lack of knowledge and familiarity with recent P2P development and research during at least the past two or three years.

In some sense, what that professor did was not just insulting my intelligence and efforts, but disregarding the reviewers of my previous publication (in ACM SIGCOMM’s affiliated workshop), the authors of other similar publications (which appeared in leading conference such as INFOCOM), and the judgment of IEEE Network’s Editor-in-Chief, who sent the manuscript of my thesis’s work for outside peer review. Had my research idea been so absurd and worthless, it should have been turned down by the many experts who reviewed such works a long time ago.

When the two professors left the room for break, the other professor told me “he is the expert,” in the sense of telling me to get lost and stop wasting my time on dreaming on impossible designs. I could sense that they also questioned how my advisor had allowed me to graduate with such an “undoable” thesis topic.

I tried to contain my puzzlement over his statement, and learn of the name of this “expert professor.” The first thing I did after getting back was to search for this professor’s publications and works, to find out how come after two years of studying the scalability problem in virtual environments and conducting extensive survey on existing literatures in various fields, maintaining contacts with both academic and industrial people, that I have not even heard of this expert professor’s name.

And this was what I found: the “expert professor” had in indeed built a platform that was not well-publicized and on which no real system was built; yet he published not even one paper about this infinitely scalable platform (in the words of the promotional document). He co-authored numerous papers on various topics unrelated to virtual environment, but had not been a first author since 1995, the year he became a full-professor. Among journal articles he published recently, the 2003 JCR impact factors were between 0.2 and 0.5. In other words, he had not been academically active for the past 10 years and had not published in leading journals or conferences.

Probably not a big surprise, his platform used client-server architecture, which my work posed as inherently less scalable than P2P.

I felt humiliated, puzzled, and a bit sad at how things turned out. Certainly this “expert” professor had lost my respect, and the experience also changed my perception of NCTU’s CS department, the most prestigious engineering school in Taiwan, for assigning such professor to conduct important admission interviews. The professor was obviously a learned man, so his ignorance was likely not due to the lack of ability but something else – perhaps arrogance?

The Ultimate Simulator

This will be my first blog. I found this service after reading an article in Fortune magazine describing the war between Google and Bill Gates.

Yesterday I talked with two friends about the possibility to use peer-to-peer (P2P) computing for protein folding simulation. The idea was simple: connect large number of volunteer computers in a P2P fashion, and each node is responsible to model one atom in a protein molecule. As the simulation goes, each node would constantly discover neighboring atoms within a pre-specified radius and would communicate the most recent coordinates with those neighbors within the "interaction sphere".

One friend expressed concern about the potentially large amount of communication required to keep the various nodes synchronized, while the other friend thought the idea was "very interesting."

I, on the other hand, was just pondering on the intriguing possibility: if protein folding were to be simulated in the most parallel fashion, how much more can you get than each atom is simulated by ONE processor? And if such thing does work, wouldn't it be in effect, the ultimate simulator?