The thin line between inspiration and plagiarism

Remember the big hoo-haa about a 19-year old author, Kaavya Vishwanathan, accused of plagiarism.

Turns out that best-selling authors get 'inspired' by each other all the time. I recently finished reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, categorized under economics by Penguin. And I am now reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. This is categorized as Popular Science by Penguin.

Read the following passages and tell me what you think of it.

This is from The Black Swan

I've had plenty of cups of coffee in my life (it's my principal addiction). I have never seen a cup of coffee jump two feet from my desk, nor has coffee spilled spontaneously on this on this manuscript without intervention (even in Russia). Indeed, it will take more than a mild coffee addiction to witness such an event; it would require more lifetimes than is perhaps conceivable - the odds are so small, one in so many zeros, that it would be impossible for me to write them down in my free time.

Yet the physical reality makes it possible for my cup to jump - very unlikely but possible. Particles jump around all the time. How come the coffee cup, itself composed of jumping particles, does not? The reason is simply, that for the cup to jump would require that all the particles jump in the same direction, and do so in lockstep several times in a row.

And this is from The Blind Watchmaker

In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happen to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move. If they then all reversed direction at the same moment the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for the marble statue to wave at us. It could happen. The odds against such a coincidence is unimaginably great but they are not incalculably great. The number is so large that the entire age of the universe so far is too short a time to write out all the noughts!

Coincidence! I don't think so. I started reading The Blind Watchmaker because it was referenced in The Black Swan (not in context of the above paragraphs though!)

Picture courtesy: Jaylopez

Calling professional games programmers

I would have done one good turn if in some not so distant future a professional programmer of the gaming world reads this blog and responds to Richard Dawkins's call. I do not believe many gaming programmers would have read The Blind Watchmaker. So, if you are that chosen one read on and figure out if this interest you ...

Read it even if you are not into gaming. This makes for a good reading.

To simulate natural selection in an interesting way in the computer ... we should concentrate ... upon simulating non-random deaths. Biomorphs [computer generated animal-like graphics following a defined logic of 'evolution'] should interact, in the computer, with a simulation of hostile environment. Something about their shape should determine whether or not they survive in that environment. Ideally, the hostile environment should include other evolving biomorphs: 'predators', 'prey', 'parasites' 'competitors'. The particular shape of a prey biomorph should determine its vulnerability to being caught, for example, by particular shapes of predator biomorphs. Such criteria of vulnerability should not be built in by the programmer. They should emerge in the same way as the shape themselves emerge. Evolution in the computer would then really take off.

If anybody is clever enough to do it, it would be the programmers who develop those noisy and vulgar arcade games - Space Invaders' derivatives. ... But these programs are small-fry compared to the program that would be written to simulate an emerging arms race between predators and prey, embedded in a complete, counterfeit ecosystem. ... If there is a professional programmer out there who feels like collaborating on the challenge, I should like to hear from him or her.

So, are you up to the challenge? Or has this already been done?

Picture courtesy: Davide Guglielmo

Defending Darwin

Most of us claim that we understand Darwin's theory. Many amongst us understand it so well that they are ready with their arguments against it. The fact remains that most of us do not have the slightest idea beyond what is very superficially taught in schools.

It is with this background that I never picked up any book that was remotely connected to evolution. I thought I understood the concept of evolution and, in my mind, any book on evolution would be variation of what is shown on National Geographic or Discovery Channel. Until now that is.

(I am not taking into account the one other occasion where I was forced to read Survival Of the Sickest (see here) though I am glad I did.)

The book in my hand right now is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. It is of 1986 vintage (reissued in 2006 - so perhaps it is not that old).

In his 2006 preface, Dawkins says:

Aside from some vague nonsense about 'monkeys', they simply did not know what Darwinism was.

In his 1986 preface he says:

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe. Take, for instance, the issue of 'chance', often dramatized as blind chance. The great majority of people that attack Darwinism leap with almost unseemly eagerness to the mistaken idea that there is nothing other than random chance in it. ... One of my tasks will be to destroy this eagerly believed myth that Darwinism is a theory of 'chance'.

I think I am going to enjoy this book.

Picture courtesy: Carsten Issels

Wonder that is nature

You think you know the wonders of nature. They have ceased to amaze you. You greet every new bit of the working of nature with a "same old ... same old". Take for example the bat. Even the kids know that they use a radar (actually a sonar) to fly at night and detect prey. No big deal about it.

Sorry to break your bubble but you have not yet scratched the surface.

Here are some amazing facts ...


While cruising some bats emit an ultrasound pulse of about 10 per second. As soon as it detects a prey, the frequency increases to 200 pulses per second. This is done largely to conserve energy.

The intensity of any sound decays at square of the distance. This is because an emitted sound will spread out as if on the surface of a sphere. The echo again will spread out likewise. So the bats ears are extremely sensitive. It needs to pick up the very low intensity reflected back from its prey. However, to ensure that the reflected sound does not die down completely, the bat has to emit sound at a very high intensity. Imagine what happens when such loud intensity sound falls on super-sensitive ears. Instant deafness! The solution. When the bat emits a high intensity, high frequency sound the "microphone" (the three bones - hammer, anvil and stirrup, same as in human ears) is muffled - for that tiny fraction - by the surrounding muscles. So it is like switch on / switch off function.

Bats are known to use both Frequency Modulation and Doppler Shift to explore the world around.

Possibly the most difficult problem of all that bats face is the danger of inadvertent 'jamming' by the cries of other bats. Human experimenters have found it surprisingly difficult to put bats off their stride by playing loud artificial ultrasound at them.  ... Many species of bats roost in enormous aggregations, in caves that must be a deafening babel of ultrasound and echos, yet the bats can still fly rapidly about the cave, avoiding the walls and each other in total darkness. How does a bat keep track of of its own echoes, and avoid being misled by others? ... [E]ach bat might have its own private frequency, just like separate radio stations. To some extent this may happen, but it is by no means the whole story. ... It seems that bats may be using something that we could call 'strangeness filter'. ... The bat's brain relies upon the the assumption that the world portrayed by any one echo pulse will be either the same as the world portrayed by the previous pulses, or only slightly different.

Now I don't know about you, but I never thought beyond 'bats use radar to fly at night'.  Amazing isn't it?

[The American zoologist] Donald Griffin tells a story of what happened when he and his colleague Robert Galambos first reported to an astonished conference of zoologists in 1940 their new discovery of the facts of bat echolocation. One distinguished scientist was so indignantly incredulous that

he seized  Galambos by the shoulders and shook him while complaining that we could not have possibly mean such an outrageous suggestion. Radar and sonar were still higgly classified developments in military technology, and the notion that bats might do anything even remotely analogous to the latest triumphs of electronic engineering struck most people as not only implausible but emotionally repugnant.

The above information and extract is taken from The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

Hmmm.... So humans developed Radar technology independently and before they got to know about bats. That human brain can develop such technology and also find if something else in nature does something similar is in itself another marvel of nature, won't you say?

Picture courtesy: Sophie