Author Archive: Ankit

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

The above are a few lines from the poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' which Oscar Wilde wrote after coming out from prison. He was charged with gross indecency just for being a homosexual in the late 19th century. He could never really emerge from his treatment at the hands of the government and declined to die destitute and penniless in France. The above lines are on his epitaph and mark the sad and unnecessary end of an absolute genius. Read 'Importance of being Earnest' or 'Dorian Gray' and you would know what I am talking about. Read his essays on aestheticism (The decay of lying) and human soul and creative spirit (The soul of man under Socialism) and you would see the world around you in a more beautiful more passionate light. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' itself is a brilliant poem. A few more lines that I like:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Another awesome poem by him is 'The Harlot's House'. I liked it so much that I took a few lines from it and used them as the epigraph in my PhD thesis. It's another matter that in a completely surreal sort of way, those lines had nothing to do whatsoever with my PhD. The title of this post ('Re-membering Wilde) is another little trivia about him which I would refrain from divulging here :).

I have lately been thinking about a rather interesting conundrum. I'm not even sure what it means to wonder about such a problem but the question is, 'why is nature so fast and our simulation of it so slow'? This statement is a rather general statement because it has the word simulation in it. There are various different ways in which natural phenomenon can be simulated so one has to be more specific here. A very simple example would be billiard balls on a table. If there are two balls on the table and the edges of the table are so far apart that we do not have to worry about the balls reflecting off of them, it's a rather simple problem to solve. One strike, one simple equation of momentum conservation and we can easily track both the balls ad-infinitum. The problem becomes exponentially more difficult when the number of balls is increased and when reflections from the edges are permitted. If the difficulty of solving a problem with 2 balls is x, the difficulty of solving a problem of 4 balls is more than 2x. And yet, the actual physical phenomenon of balls hitting each other doesn't take any more time to occur as the number of balls is increased. Another example would be the movement of stars under their mutual gravitational fields. If there are only two stars one can find an exact solution to the problem. No such solution exists even for 3 stars. In fact the time complexity for solving this problem (to arbitrary accuracy) increases as where n is the number of stars considered. And yet, the stars just seem to move, completely oblivious of our own difficulties following their movements. A closer problem to my own expertise is one of mechanical and dynamical simulations but the essential idea is the same. Nature appears fast whereas our simulation of it grows exponentially slow. And I think that  it is a nontrivial question to wonder why that is the case. Is it possible to do any better? The examples I mentioned are all the more compelling because at the level of abstraction that I am talking about, we pretty much know the laws which govern the natural processes. It's not like the problem of vision where machine vision appears much more computationally intensive and slow than human vision. I think that in the vision problem we are not very sure of the underlying laws so the two problems, nature and computation, are not analogous in the sense that some physical problems are.

It appears immediately that in a natural phenomenon small parts respond simply to the stimuli provided from their nearest neighbors. A single star in a gravitational system doesn't respond immediately to the change in position of a faraway star. The gravitational information propagates at a certain speed so that it is natural that the response of a star at a certain moment is only due to its immediate neighborhood and I think this is the key problem in our current picture. We are mostly trying to solve steady state problems where the information from all parts of our domain has already reached all other parts. By steady state I just mean that we are trying to solve problems at a time scale which is much larger than the speed of information travel. This essentially means that our solution has to take into account the whole domain of the problem. In technical terms it means that we have to invert huge matrices which is a computationally intensive process with a time complexity necessarily larger than . Can we do better with a paradigm shift in how we simulate the world? I cannot help but wonder.

Sometimes I like to think about the kind of books that I admire, trying to find patterns in my likes and dislikes. It reveals some truth about my own personality to myself and muddles up some other parts but it's always a fun exercise in the end. A great book, to me, is also often a simple book, but it's the simple ones which are the most difficult to write. They are books about normal people who are trying to survive  in what is essentially an unsympathetic world. They live lives of the everyman with unfulfilled desires and suffocated passions while trying to make the best they can of the hard hand that they have been dealt. Being humans they fumble and make mistakes and weaken and break down. And being humans they scheme in little ways and betray those who love them. Theirs is a gray world with muddled up moral boundaries and vague rationality. There is nothing special about the dark side of their nature as they are compassionate and loving in the same useless kind of way in which they are devious and cruel. They all want to be someone else and be somewhere else just like the rest of us and they have all the insecurities that we all have. Those special characters which appear so different from us in the pages of the greatest literature are actually the ones which are closest to all of us. What elevates such books to greatness is the explicit presentation of this unity of human emotions - a rare talent which only the greatest minds possess. As we see the world from our myopic visions, what we miss the most are the things closest to us. It takes a special mind to make us aware of those truths again.

Let's take the example of a book I often like to think about: Lolita. Only an idiot would actually think that the sinful charm of the book lies in its subject matter. Yes the book talks about the eloquent Humbert Humbert who happens to have a thing for young girls but that's not the point really. The towering achievement of the book is the fact that it manages to evoke an immense sympathy for its 'debauched' protagonist. And it manages to do that in the face of all the received wisdom that has been injected into our veins over the last half century. Nabokov didn't go for the low hanging fruit. It's easy to feel repulsed by such a man because that's precisely what we have been conditioned to do. Nabokov managed for us to feel sorry at his loss. And he managed it by appealing to some of our deepest hidden and purest of feelings. The feelings of intense romantic passion and the unqualified capacity for care that it engenders. The myriad explosion of complex emotions that come in its wake, including the willingness to flaunt the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior and the readiness to be insensitive and hurtful to others. The book is really about how cruel the business of love can be and Lolita, in the form of the 13 year old girl, is the cruelest of them all. The thing that disturbs me the most about the book is that it succeeds too well as a work of art. A good work of art must not have an automatic moral agenda and Nabokov's Lolita has none either. But in his absolute genius Nabokov ends up completely polarizing my sympathies towards the adult 'transgressor'. Lolita's story and her sufferings, which must surely exist, are completely forgotten. It's a sad fallout of the book. The young 13 year old who might have begun her escapades in sinful curiosities must surely have grown older with emotional scars aplenty. It's not even a hypothetical and a purely fictional situation either. I do not know how else to put it but it's a little sad that in Nabokov's resplendent and erudite prose, the simple voice of Lolita's pain and happiness could not find a place - just like it must happen time and again in our real adult world. And perhaps that's Nabokov's final masterstroke and a meta sort of interpretation of my theory of great books. Lolita presents a faithful and sad-eyed reproduction of reality in the mute sufferings of the 13 year old!