Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #2

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times the summation of the square root

of the traffic on the J channel

over the sum of all traffics

summed over all channels squared

over uc (1 minus n-bar rho).

Whatever that equation means, it tells you

what the minimum response time will be

for a network once it's optimized.

The computer was claiming that it could

deliver the message before you even sent it.

So if you had a post office like that

of course you would use it, right?

This was a simplified but

exact model at the time.

Now we have other aspects of it.

But it's basically the underlying

principles of the network,

and one of the things

we found, surprisingly,

was that the larger the network is

the far more efficient it becomes.

Like a gambling casino that certainly makes

money if you have millions of gamblers

at the slot machines?

Very much so.

You've articulated what we call

the law of large numbers.

The law of large numbers says

that a large population of

unpredictable players,

or messages,

collectively behaves

in a very predictable fashion,

a fashion we can write down exactly.

And therefore we can predict the

performance of a network when its large.

The underlying technology has scaled

by a factor of a million

in computational speed,

in bandwidth of communications,

in storage capacity and it

may go for another decade

to a factor of a billion

or even a trillion.

Nothing in the history of

mankind has ever worked

as a technological contribution

over that span of growth.

Back to the very early times,

times of speculative concepts

of a connected world...

in the early 60s,

many years before the first

Apple personal computer,

a young thinker, Ted Nelson,

had his own ideas about

creating a computer network.

The web as we know it

took a different route,

but Nelson's ideas are still dormant.

It was an experience

of water and interconnection.

I was with my grandparents

in a rowboat in Chicago,

so I must have been five years old

and I was trailing my hand in the water.

And I thought about how the water

was moving around my fingers,

opening on one side and

closing on the other,

and that changing system of relationships

where everything was kind of similar,

kind of the same and yet different.

That was so difficult to

visualize and express,

and just generalizing that

to the entire universe that

the world is a system

of ever changing

relationships and structures

struck me as...

a vast truth... which it is!

And...

so interconnection and

expressing that interconnection

has been the center of all my thinking,

and all my computer work

has been about expressing and representing

and showing interconnection

among writings especially.

And writing is the process of reducing

a tapestry of interconnection

to a narrow sequence.

And this is in a sense illicit.

This is a wrongful compression

of what should spread out.

And today's computers they've betrayed that

because there's no system for decent

cut and paste and they've changed

the meaning of the words "cut and paste"

and pretended it was the same thing.

So a guy named Larry Tesler,

whom I consider to be a good friend,

nevertheless changed those words

and I consider that to be a crime against

humanity and he doesn't understand why.

Because humanity has no

decent writing tools.

In any case, this is the problem:

interconnection and representation

and sequentialization all...

similar to the issue of water.

So here we have a parallel presentation

that shows the quotation

connected to its original context.

"In the beginning God created

the heaven and the earth"

and where is that from?

That is from the King James Bible.

So we can step down to the next quotation.

"Adam and Lilith immediately

began to fight"

and that is from the Alphabet of ben Sira.

And so as we pull back we

can see successive pages

coming up to connect with their sources

or with their linked contents.

His vision of links never materialized.

By some he was labeled

insane for clinging on.

There are two contradictory slogans.

One is that continuing to do the same thing

and expecting a different result

is the definition of insanity.

On the other hand, if at

first you don't succeed,

try, try again.

I prefer the latter because I don't want

to be remembered as the guy who didn't.

No, to us you appear to be

the only one around

who is clinically sane.

No one has ever said that before.

Usually I hear the opposite.

Thank you very much for talking with us.

It was wonderful.

Marvelous.

What a team.

Yes, now it's your turn.

Today the sheer numbers

of unpredictable players on the internet

has led to some of its greatest glories.

Fundamental research into cancer, AIDS,

and other diseases,

has been slowed down by a complex problem

which has to do with

the intricate folding of molecules.

Scientists using super computers

could not solve it.

Adrien Treuille was one of the creators

of a video game calling upon the community

of video gamers out there in the world.

Here we can see an RNA molecule

folded up into

this beautiful helical pattern,

it forms a helix,

and the amazing thing is that this pattern

is formed out of very, very simple rules

which pull it together

and create this shape.

And so it's a little bit like...

you can think of your hands

as there are simple rules

which determine how it can bend,

and then there are certain ways

in which it loves to come together

to form a compact shape

and that's just what these molecules

are doing in the body.

And your shirts, for example,

you are into shirt folding?

These molecules

fold up in much the same way

that a shirt folds.

You can imagine it starts

completely unfolded

and not at all suitable

to put in your drawer,

but if you follow very, very simple rules

it becomes this beautiful package

that you can then store and show.

We took the latest scientific models

of a biomolecule folding

and we created a game

and we put it on the web without

knowing what would happen

and without knowing if

it would be fun at all,

if anyone would come, and...

instantly people arrived

and they broke down the computers.

We had to build new computers.

And they played and they

spoke with one another

and they taught one another

about the science as non-experts,

and they began reading papers and they

began studying and understanding.

We have lawyers, we have school kids,

we have retired people,

we have bedridden people,

we have grandmas.

It's really everyone

from age 10 to age 100.

This idea was impossible

before the internet and

the response was stunning.

Within days, hundreds

of thousands joined in

and they solved the puzzle.

The world responded,

and it was beautiful.

And here is where you'd

design a new molecule

and in many ways we tried to...

subliminally, you might say,

help the players understand

and inhabit the world of the molecule.

So we placed the whole game in this water

and we put all of these little bubbles

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