Birthdays and paradoxes

I was sitting down, thinking of an amusing article to write, and I didn’t quite feel up to writing. It’s been a long weekend, and besides, it’s a special day for me today.

So I thought, “What the heck”.

Then I thought I should at least leave you with something. So I’ll introduce you to the concept of the birthday paradox. Basically, given a group of 23 people, what’s the percentage chance that any 2 persons in that group share the same birthday? (hint: it’s higher than you think. Here’s a less clinical explanation of the paradox than the one from Wikipedia.).

How long does your program live? Part 1

Have you considered the lifespan of your programs? You might have thought of scaling issues, security concerns and hardware settings. What if your program is still used 5 years down the road? 10 years? 20? Will it still work?

I had the occasion to work on a system. The thing was, it dealt with financial years. In case you’re wondering, a financial year (typically?) starts on April to the following March. So financial year 2009/2010 starts from April 2009 to March 2010. Calendar years are the “normal” ones, starting from January to December of that year.

Where was I? Oh right, the system with the financial years. So the Unix shell script that runs as an interface displayed up to the latest 5 financial years. There’s an accompanying set of C programs, as well as a corresponding set of database tables. It’s not well thought of, but it’s the best under the circumstances.

What happened was, every time a new financial year arrived, a new set of database tables was created (appropriately named of course). And a new set of C programs copied and pasted and edited (to insert, update and delete from the new database tables). And new lines of code added to that Unix shell script. This happens in late February and March, to prepare for the imminent arrival of April (April has more clout than August, even though August is well respected…)

So I did that for one year. Then the next year arrived, and I found myself with 7 financial years worth of program options, but only needed to display 5. The manager and senior colleague were already set to go for the path of least resistance: doing whatever worked last year. I decided otherwise.

I went through the code for the shell scripts, database scripts, stored procedures and C programs. The code were all flexible in that only the financial year portion was changed. So I told them that I’m going to change all the code so that the code took in the financial year as a parameter, or that it automatically calculated the correct financial years. The manager gave me the go ahead, and I went to work quickly, for it was February, and it’s unknown if I could get it to work in time.

There were some problems, and I’ll tell you about them in the 2nd part of this exciting mini-series…

Our future – The Sims and The Matrix

I was wondering, what would happen if we run out of resources on Earth? We’d probably all die, which is kind of depressing. So I thought of how not to run out of resources in the first place.

[image by Andrejs Zemdega]

I have 2 obvious answers. One is regeneration of our resources, through recycling, reusing and reducing. That doesn’t appear to be enough, since we consume too much.

The second answer is intergalactic colonisation. “We can’t control our own planet’s resources, so we’ll just take over another planet!” Even if we disregard the moral and selfish motivation of that reason, there’s still one tiny problem. Our scientific space program isn’t up to par yet. We might run out of resources before our science and technology is advanced enough.

So I came up with another answer. Now, if you assume that humans are driven by needs and wants, then… ok, let me define needs and wants first. Needs are critical to human survival, or at least make it easier to survive. Wants are wishes… let me give examples then. You need food, shelter and clothing (to protect from weather). You want to travel, to play video games and to wear Gucci products.

The distinction between a need and want is subjective (does steak qualify as a need or want?). We don’t need the distinction to be obvious anyway. So what’s the answer? Push the wants into a virtual world.

Create a virtual world where the wants can be satisfied by bits and bytes rather than carbon, wool, oil, water and other natural resources.

For it to work, the experience must be indistinguishable from what can be experienced now. Hence The Matrix. What we call reality, is just a sum total of what our senses tell us anyway. Simulate the senses correctly, and you get “reality”. The game franchise “The Sims” has been steadily heading towards this end. Its limits are the number of objects available (including other Sims), the number of interactions available and the number of sensory inputs.

With the wants satisfied in the virtual world, there should be more resources in the real world. If nothing else, this should give the option of regeneration more time to regenerate resources. Or more time to spread our human genes to other galaxies.

Is the virtual world solution easier to implement (we programmers have much to do then)? Will it upset the economy (most definitely)? Will the virtual world consume more resources (servers have carbon footprints too)?