Algorithms, Art, and a Lack Thereof
Three years ago. About the time I started to take interest in algorithms and theoretical computer science for whatever messed up reason, my other… let’s say, ‘extracurricular’, interests started shifting as well, from very broadly, ‘natural sciences’, into, well, ‘arts’.
I’d pay more attention to randomly placed things on campus, hanging on walls, in screens on hallways, whatever they’re there for. Start to discover how things are beautiful around me. Slowing down in museums around all places. Shift into independent games (a topic worth another article for, I guess, there’s plenty of interest in here after all). Just, in general, try to view things not from the perspective of a scientist or researcher, but more of an artist, or maybe even just a normal person. To try to appreciate more than analyze, in other words.
The reason for this change I do not understand to this day. Maybe I learned enough to lose interest over science in general - it seems to me, however subliminal it might be, that we have exhausted what there is to discover. Well, how presumptuous that is, considering that our entire species is but a spec of dust in the long river of time and other things. Still, I started looking into more spiritual things, say art, literature, and other forms of beauty. Maybe I just grew older.
This being said, I’ve never been an artistic person, nor have I ever considered myself to be. Only thing I’ve drawn, well, pixelart with Microsoft Paint, and the only one of those took me an entire month or so to click and drag out.
Thus I’ve been troubled, and so for quite some time. How much am I moved, awed, amazed by their beauty, how much am I unsatisfied about myself, about my missing talent.
It’s not really ‘jealousy’, I think. No, we all have talents of our own, lives of our own, and purposes of our own; Theirs, in art and literature, and mine, in (I hope) algorithmic sciences.
It’s more of a form of… sadness. About me, who I am, and who I am not. How tragic and sarcastic is that? Such a tender soul, trapped in a mind full of logic and stone-cold sanity. I feel shapes, voices, muses, all around me, dancing to me, their beauty emanating from every corner of this world, one so gentle and caring in this reality. I feel them, I can almost touch them, but there’s nothing much else for me to do: It’s like being the lone wanderer at the end of time - the end of your time - people talk to you, speak to you, as much as this world does; But this being a one-sided mirror, your interaction stops here, there’s no one to reply, to deliver, to live on. It’s just you and your own void, your own creative and artistic void. It’s a solidarity unknown to others and unreplicable by others.
So I wondered and pondered the reason behind my change with no avail. How can I regret the past, no, but how can I not feel sorry for myself, for what I could have been, might have been.
Taking a step back into reality. Anyone academically familiar to me should have heard me make to at least some extent the analogy of algorithmic sciences as architecture. Are they not the same discipline in different contexts? Building elegant complexes from but the most basic and fundamental objects to their universes, born to and bathed in sparks of genius and burning passion.
To achieve the same goal, different, or even to say distinct, pathes can be taken. A place to live - something suitable for that purpose, to say - be it the Falling Waters somewhere out there or the god forsaken Hunt Library, they can be equally effective at doing the bare minimum of that. But are they the same? Not with a grain of sanity left in your soul.
I say the same to algorithmic sciences. To count Pythagorean triples, one can surely enumerate all such triples (after all, the three-dimensional natural number space is countable, fortunately for mankind), and verify if each of them satisfies the math. But then we can also map that into an instance of polynomial multiplication and solve that with a single simple fast Fourier Transform. Is that not beauty? Is that not elegance? Is that not getting things done in a more satisfying way? Is that not… art?
For sure, to some extent, that is exactly what art is. Looking at lines, words, characters, meaning nothing by themselves like strokes on a blank canvas, yet resonating with each other, forming a larger picture, appreciable by the eyes of the mindful.
But things are different after all. Algorithms are not paintings, novels, symphonies. There have not been, and most likely will never be a museum of gallery for algorithms and algorithmic methods, as after all, not everyone is a computer scientist, and not every computer scientist is an algorithm architect.
Sometime last year, while browsing the archives for things related to my work, I came across an article, one short and simple with few citations, titled ‘Binary Search on Graphs’ or something of that nature. Nothing special, really, every somewhat educated person in a field anyhow related to computer science or mathematics should know what a graph looks like or how binary search works.
But are such ideas not amazing, inspiring, awe-strucking? Two of the many most fundamental concepts to computer science, unrelated to each other anyhow, but somehow algorithmic sciences find a way, giving birth to what I saw on that day.
Then, slowly but inevitably, reality poured down, and I drowned in this ecstasy known to my own soul. To most people, even those around me, around one of the most computer-scientific places in this universe, this is but an article, some extra burden if it were to be read. They would care if this would get jobs done, get something done; They tend not to care how it is done, nor the brilliance behind how it is done.
It is to this end that I am alone, like a lone wanderer at the end of his time, drowned in helpless sorrow and solidarity.
I entitled myself an algorithm architect for such reasons. I intend not to write senseless mindless machines and clockwerks, but creations of my own, of my own tender soul.
And I wish to let people know. To say not enlighten, rather show them the beauty and elegance hidden behind the lifeless and cruel logics and lines. To let them realize as I did - the design and devise of algorithms, this can be art, this is simply art.
Is this anyhow possible? Is it possible, that algorithms would too, be something we stay alive for? I know not, perhaps I think not as well. But to think someone out there would appreciate my work like I to the aforementioned article - it drives me forward, keeps me going. To design something, devise something, and write something, so that sometime somewhere someone will look into this piece of my soul, and exclaim just as I did, “Is this not art.”
June 11, 2020. A quite night in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.