A Mind at Play

Mar 2

“A Mind at Play” is a biography of Claude Shannon who was a pioneer of information theory - this book is part of my reading to understand “How Big Things Get Done”. I only knew Shannon from my probability course as someone who had a relatively niche theorem of channel coding named after him, and only picked this book because I enjoyed watching Jimmy Soni. This is less of a book review, and more of an essay on my takeaways after reading the book. Shannon was not just a prolific genius with world-class intuition, but a creature of curiosity and delight - so let’s start there.

On Curiosity and Play

I’ve always been unhealthily obsessed with being a “great” scientist or inventor. I loved re-reading Dead Famous Da Vinci as a middle-schooler, moved on to Surely You’re Joking Mr.Feynman as a 10th grader, and finally graduated to Steve Jobs as I finished high-school. The exploration into science history continued with a look at the life of Tesla, Niels Bohr, Pixar and John Carmack. The halls of the past have always been a place of envy for me, not just for the superintelligent beings that wandered them like Von Neumann and Euler, but for the forgotten mathematicians like Oliver Heavyside.

At 26, neither a scientist nor an inventor, let alone a great one, I’ve had the time to reflect on this far-reaching ideal I haven’t lived up to both on an emotional and an intellectual level. A big part of striving for this was ego - could a book like this be written about me one day? As someone who was slightly above average at school for a long time, the path felt initially clear, but fell further and further away every year. There is no complicated reason I haven’t gotten there - I wasn’t smart enough and I wasn’t deeply interested in the things I was exploring. My explorations just satiated my thirst for achievement and recognition, and didn’t fulfill any fundamental curiosity I had about the way the world worked.

My own lack of curiosity was apparent to me when I was reading about Shannon’s approach to problems. Shannon, unsurprisingly, worked at Bell Labs, where he along with other researchers were tasked with figuring out, among other things, how “fundamental questions of physics or chemistry might someday affect communications”. The book gives a holistic account of how Shannon got to where he was biographically, but I was consistently drawn to the parts of the book that talked of Shannon’s curiosity and play.

“Building devices like chess-playing machines and juggling robots even as a ‘shumi’, might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money”: Shannon admitted. “But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”

This is hardly a revelation - plenty of folks (Feynman included) talk of pursuing things you’re curious about. But you can’t tell people anything, and I needed this reminder that being curious about something was more important than finishing it, tweeting about it or writing about it. Reading this revitalized my interest random projects that go unfinished, and brings me back to the core question of why I started working on something. The authors put it beautifully:

Mathematicians worry about spending time on problems of insufficient difficulty, what they derisively call “toy problems”. Claude Shannon worked with actual toys in public! Time and again, he pursued projects that might have caused others embararassment, engaged questions that seemed trivial or minor, then managed to wring the breakthroughs out of them. It takes no small degree of self assurance to try to build a brain that would outclass one’s own-or, for that matter, to build a machine whose only function is to turn itself off.

And that is connected, we think, to the other great hallmark of Shannon’s life: the value of finding joy in work. We expect our greatest minds to bear the deepest scars; we prefer our geniuses tortured. But with the exception of a few years in his twenties when Shannon passed through what seems like a moody, possibly even depressive, stage, his life and work seemed to be one continuous game. He was, at once, abnormally brilliant and normally human.

He did none of this consciously: he wasn’t straining to give it appearance of fun. Shannon simply delighted in the various curiosities that grabbed his attention, and the testimony of those around him suggests that it was a delight that, like his mind, was polymorphous. He could find himself lost in the intricacies of an engineering problem, and then, just as suddenly, become captivated by a chess position.

For a long time I’ve believed that the history of science and engineering is littered with the names of a thousand unknown people whose shots in the dark failed spectacularly. For every successful Henry Ford, there were likely a hundred unsuccessful ordinary people. Until I read this book, that thought filled me with dread. Was I statistically destined to irrelevance?

But Claude Shannon would not care if his work was useful. Shannon, with or without his information theory, would have continued to tinker and play. Even if history is littered with the failed attempts of unknown faces, you are still allowed to live your life. And as long as enough people try to play and build things, someone, in aggregate, will help us move forward. That person does not have to be you - individual achievement is far less valuable when viewed from a lens of play.

On Research

It was amusing to read about Shannon’s thresholds for good research against the backdrop of an exponential number of AI research papers:

we must keep our own house in first class order. The subject of information theory has certainly been sold, if not oversold. We should now turn our attention to the business of research and development at the highest scientific plane we can maintain. Research rather than exposition is the keynote, and our critical thresholds should be raised. Authors should submit only their best efforts, and these only after careful criticism by themselves and their colleagues. A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their reader.

There are plenty of reasons why we might think our present day academic system is broken - Peter Higgs has famously said that he wouldn’t be productive enough for the present-day academic system and Alexey Guzey has an excellent article on why it well might be the case. Still, hearing Shannon say this in the 60s gives me the hope that hype cycles are timeless, and research and technology will continue to progress despite our tendency to get caught up in the fashion of the season.

On Courage

This was a surprising framing that I never thought about, but Richard Hamming talking of Shannon having courage is interesting:

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

This is from his excellent talk “You and Your Research” which you absolutely should read if you haven’t.

Answering my Questions

How hard vs. smart did people who got big things done work?

Shannon worked very smart (ruthlessly simplified), but also worked hard when he had to! There were days when he would be occupied with a problem and zone everything else out. When he was at Bell labs helping the war effort, he had to work on his “interesting” problems after hours. He spent ten years coming up with his theory for information before publishing it. He also had plenty of half finished papers that he just left in that state.

Shannon definitely had a huge degree of innate genius - but was not notably precocious. A large part of his genius was discovered later with his incredible intuition. The biggest trait that stood out was curiosity.

How did they interact with other people?

Shannon was a recluse, but only in ordinary social settings. When it was something he enjoyed like juggling or talking about building a machine to beat roulette, Shannon was incredibly fun. He was also notably described as warm throughout the book, and always helped people see their own problems in a different light without judgement towards their solution.

Did they go wide or deep?

Both! Shannon went extremely deep into (for example) information theory and building his maze-solving mouse. But he also dabbled in genetics research, was interested in the mechanics of juggling and wrote how a set of mirrors could help an American drive better in Britain. Vanevar Bush felt confident in Shannon’s ability to pick up practically any new field at the highest level (he was the one who suggested that Shannon do genetic research).

“Play” does strike me as Shannon’s most important value. There were also places where rigor stood out as a theme - Shannon had high standards for published research that he held himself to. Simplicity was another important factor - Shannon had a way of reducing a problem to its core and building up theoretical abstractions from there.