Category Archives: Brain teasers

Thinslicing joke, otherwise lost to the world

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Phew, just found my  joke I contributed to the xs4all Science Jokes site wayback in March 2001. Now it looks like a joke about #thinslicing, in part because it includes concepts borrowed from my travels – heterogeneous organisation of data – comes from talking to a group of computer scientists at a First Tuesday meeting in 2000:

Q: How do you find a needle in a haystack?

Scientist says: One draws up a research and development proposal for a new
and improved device, costing $100m in budget and just under $200m on final
completion. The device can harvest for needles in any given haystack in any
terrain at any time, and operated by remote or even hands-on control.

Chaotician says: Faced with such a heterogeneous organisation of data you
assemble a bunch of friends (say ten or less, or maybe more if there is free
alcohol) and hold a party on the haystack. Someone will be bound to find the
needle by stepping or sitting on it. Or if they don’t something much more
strange + interesting will appear, so that the needle is classified as a
variant hay-straw. And the new discovery classified as the strange attractor.

 

Want a practical complexity heuristic?

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Update: 7 May 2016

What I didn’t explain is the hard part is figuring out what the parts are, and how they fit together. But there’s a good example in my upselling solution blog post, on how I figured out what imho was blocking growth at Causeway, with the help of expert ‘sales hacker’ Richard Harris. I guess the exec team at Causeway have found their own way to a solution, with the business transition to SaaS.

There you go, click on the pic for the three tweet answer, thanks.

Beware: this is not ‘top level’ thinking. This is a heuristic.

PS: I came up with all this a day after staring in to the sky whilst waiting for the morning minibus to Sony in Weybridge – and after tweeting about a strange line in the sky – by chance stumbled on the origin of the phrase ‘Occam’s Razor’ which is relevant to the design of heuristics: “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”

The answer to my question – ‘Ockham Stack’ (see Q & A below with @CoxeyLoxey) – is named after the village in Surrey where William of Ockham, the guy who coined the phrase Occam’s Razor, came from. So hope that didn’t increase beyond what’s necessary, the # entities required to explain it!