Calibrating the Range

http://www.microsoft.com/devnews/andy15.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)

Calibrating the Range, continued.....

(Continued from Developer Network News home page)

Douglas Adams is, as you probably know, the acclaimed and hilarious author of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and various other philosophical journeys in the guise of fictional treatises. He bills himself as "Chief Fantasist, the Digital Village," and his topic was "Living in a Virtual World."

Adams' objective was to hammer home one central point: "Don't build dead pages. Build living models."

The personal computer, he said, was originally thought of as just a kind of powerful calculator. "Then someone figured out that you could have numbers stand for characters, and you could use the computer as a typewriter. Next came the notion that you could put pictures on the monitor, and we understood that a computer could be a kind of television. Now, with the World Wide Web, it seems that many of us think that computers have evolved into being a large collection of brochures. But in reality the computer is none of these. It is instead a modeling machine to help us understand the world better, and to help us abandon our old models that aren't useful or accurate any more.

Virtual world, please say hello to the real world

"Within this century," Adams said, "we've essentially led local lives. We've had ways of doing one-to-many communication using newspapers and broadcast media, and ways of communicating one-to-one with the telephone, and ways of communicating many-to-many in face-to-face town meetings. But our personal communications have really been local. Now, for the first time, with the Web, we have a way of communicating many-to-many across the world. For the first time, our means of communication in the virtual world is a match for all the ways we have to communicate in the real world."

The real challenge, Adams said, is "how do we make the modeling machine in our heads work well with the modeling machine in the computer. And the problem is that if you have an inherently flawed model, then you can't use the incoming data properly."

Who’s calibrating this model, anyway?

Adams told the story of a scientific study about dolphin intelligence: "The researchers wanted the dolphin to jump out of the water and make a certain noise, and then they would reward it with a fish. At first the experiment seemed to be working. The dolphin would jump out of the water, make a noise, and get the fish. Then the dolphin's performance started to degrade. The dolphin would jump out of the water and make a different noise, or apparently make no noise at all. So the data seemed random, and the experiment didn't seem to be working.

"Then the researchers took a look at the sound recordings they had made. It turned out that the dolphin was indeed making a sound each time it jumped out of the water, but sometimes the sound was below the human hearing threshold. And there was a pattern to the variations. It turned out that while the scientists thought the experiment was about getting the dolphin to jump out of the water, make a noise, and get a fish, the dolphin was using the experiment to calibrate the range of human hearing."

Playing by oceanic rules

Dr. GUI wandered off into the rest of his day with one of Adams' final points ricocheting through his lobsterfied brain pan. "I do a lot of going around and speaking at various places about the virtual world and the effects computers and the Internet will likely have on the real one. And I get asked the same question over and over. Someone in the publishing industry, for example, will say, 'Do you really think the Internet will have much of an effect on publishing?'

"That's really a rather silly question, isn't it? It is like someone who lives on the Nile River asking, 'When the Atlantic Ocean arrives, do you really think it will have much effect on the Nile?'

"The answer, of course, is yes. When the ocean arrives, all the river rules go away."