"How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof....how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save this world? How could you......?
.........................
" Because" Nash said slowly in his soft reasonable, southern drawl as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."
That was from A Beautiful Mind : a biography of the Nobel laureate and mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. by Sylvia Nasar.
Almost half a century earlier Srinivasan Ramanujan had put it slightly differently "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God". He was certain that it was goddess Namagiri, to whom he owed his mathematical gifts. Namagiri would write the equations on his tongue, Namagiri would bestow mathematical insights in his dreams. (The Man who knew Infinity a biography of Srinivasan Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel
Their respective colleagues would state categorically that it was as if Ramanujan and Nash knew the final answers before they even saw the problem. How do such brilliant minds work? Is it intuition? The Oxford dictionary defines intuition as immediate apprehension or insight without reasoning.
Scientists are forever curious to know. Google's AlphaGO , an algorithm programmed to play the board game GO, is the latest attempt to mimic this elusive human trait. Located on networked computers (technical term distributed computing) the AlphaGO algorithm enables
not only programmed moves but also intuitive decisions, its creators claim. With a computing power amounting to 1202 CPUs and 172 GPUs, AlphaGO demonstrated its capability when it won 4-1 against the world champion Lee Sedol, recently.
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| A GO game in progress(courtesy en:wikipedia) Played with white and black chips, it is basically a "surround and eliminate" game |
Tailpiece:
"Proof and Verification" are the mainstays of Science. In a recent editorial Nature cautions: Intuitive machines will need more than trust; they will demand Faith.
A Beautiful Mind, biography of the Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. by Sylvia Nasar was made into a film in 2001 with the same title. "The Man who knew Infinity" a film based on Kanigel's book has just been released.
References:
1. The man who knew Infinity : Robert Kanigel, Scriber 1991;Abacus 1999
2. A Beautiful Mind : Sylvia Nasar, Faber& Faber 1998
3. A Mathematician's Apology : G.H. Hardy , Cambridge University Press, 1967
4. AlphaGO
4. How Google's AlphaGO Beat Lee Sedol
5. In two moves AlphaGO and Lee Sedol Redefined the future
5. Digital Intuition Nature, 529, 437 (28 January 2016)
