{"id":1487,"date":"2013-08-05T11:37:33","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T16:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1487"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:36:37","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:36:37","slug":"the-superscott-and-morgan-freeman-faq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=1487","title":{"rendered":"The SuperScott and Morgan Freeman FAQ"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chessboard\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Update (Sept. 3):<\/strong><\/span> When I said that “about 5000 steps” are needed for the evolutionary approach to color an 8×8 chessboard, I was counting as a step any examination<\/em> of two random adjacent squares—regardless of whether or not you end up having to change one of the colors.\u00a0 If you count only the changes, then the expected number goes down to about 1000 (which, of course, only makes the point about the power of the evolutionary approach “stronger”).\u00a0 Thanks very much to Raymond Cuenen for bringing this clarification to my attention.<\/p>\n

\n

Last week I appeared on an episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman<\/a>, a show on the Science Channel.\u00a0 (See also here<\/a> for a post on Morgan Freeman’s Facebook page.)\u00a0 The episode is called “Did God Create Evolution?”<\/em>\u00a0 The first person interviewed is the Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe.\u00a0 But not to worry!\u00a0 After him, they have a parade of scientists who not only agree that Chuck Darwin basically had it right in 1859, but want to argue for that conclusion using ROBOTS!\u00a0 and MATH!<\/p>\n

So, uh, that’s where I come in.\u00a0 My segment features me (or rather my animated doppelg\u00e4nger, “SuperScott”) trying to color a chessboard two colors, so that no two neighboring squares are colored the same, using three different approaches: (1) an “intelligent design” approach (which computer scientists would call nondeterminism), (2) a brute-force, exhaustive enumeration approach, and (3) an “evolutionary local search” approach.<\/p>\n

[Spoiler alert:<\/strong><\/span> SuperScott discovers that the local search approach, while not as efficient as intelligent design, is nevertheless much more efficient than brute-force search.\u00a0 And thus, he concludes, the arguments of the ID folks to the effect of “I can’t see a cleverer way to do it, therefore it must<\/strong> be either brute-force search or else miraculous nondeterminism” are invalid.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Since my appearance together with Morgan Freeman on cable TV raises a large number of questions, I’ve decided to field a few of them in the following FAQ.<\/p>\n

Q: How can I watch?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amazon Instant Video has the episode here for $1.99<\/a>.\u00a0 (No doubt you can also find it on various filesharing sites, but let it be known that I’d never condone such nefarious activity.)\u00a0 My segment is roughly from 10:40 until 17:40.<\/p>\n

Q: Given that you’re not a biologist, and that your research has basically nothing to do with evolution, why did they ask to interview you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apparently they wanted a mathematician or computer scientist who also had some experience spouting about Big Ideas.\u00a0 So they first asked Greg Chaitin, but Chaitin couldn’t do it and suggested me instead.<\/p>\n

Q: Given how little relevant expertise you have, why did you agree<\/em> to be interviewed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be honest, I was extremely conflicted.\u00a0 I kept saying, “Why don’t you interview a biologist?\u00a0 Or at least a computational biologist, or someone who studies genetic algorithms?”\u00a0 They replied that they did<\/em> have more bio-oriented people on the show, but they also wanted me to provide a “mathematical” perspective.\u00a0 So, I consulted with friends like Sean Carroll<\/a>, who’s appeared on Through the Wormhole<\/em> numerous times.\u00a0 And after reflection, I decided that I do<\/em> have a way to explain a central conceptual point about algorithms, complexity, and the amount of time needed for natural selection—a point that, while hardly “novel,” is something that many laypeople might not have seen before and that might interest them.\u00a0 Also, as an additional argument in favor of appearing, MORGAN FREEMAN!<\/p>\n

\"morganfreeman\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So I agreed to do it, but only under two conditions:<\/p>\n

(1) At least one person with a biology background would also appear on the show, to refute the arguments of intelligent design.
\n(2) I would talk only about stuff that I actually understood, like the ability of local search algorithms to avoid the need for brute-force search.<\/p>\n

I’ll let you judge for yourself to what extent these conditions were fulfilled.<\/p>\n

Q: Did you get to meet Morgan Freeman?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alas, no.\u00a0 But at least I got to hear him refer repeatedly to “SuperScott” on TV.<\/p>\n

Q: What was the shooting like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Extremely interesting.\u00a0 I know more now about TV production than I did before!<\/p>\n

It was a continuing negotiation: they kept wanting to say that I was “on a quest to mathematically prove evolution” (or something like that), and I kept telling them they weren’t allowed to say that, or anything else that would give the misleading impression that what I was saying was either original or directly related to my research.\u00a0 I also had a long discussion about the P vs. NP problem, which got cut for lack of time (now P and NP are only shown on the whiteboard).\u00a0 On the other hand, the crew was extremely accommodating: they really wanted to do a good job and to get things right.<\/p>\n

The most amusing tidbit: I knew that local search would take O(n4<\/sup>) time to 2-color an nxn chessboard (2-coloring being a special case of 2SAT, to which Sch\u00f6ning’s algorithm<\/a> applies), but I didn’t know the constant.\u00a0 So I wrote a program to get the specific number of steps when n=8 (it’s about 5000).\u00a0 I then repeatedly modified and reran the program during the taping, as we slightly changed what we were talking about.\u00a0 It was the first coding I’d done in a while.<\/p>\n

Q: How much of the segment was your idea, and how much was theirs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The chessboard was my idea, but the “SuperScott” bit was theirs.\u00a0 Luddite that I am, I was just going to get down on hands and knees and move apples and oranges around on the chessboard myself.<\/p>\n

Also, they wanted me to speak in front of a church in Boston, to make a point about how many people believe that God created the universe.\u00a0 I nixed that idea and said, why not just do the whole shoot in the Stata Center?\u00a0 I mean, MIT spent $300 million just<\/em> to make the building where I work as “visually arresting” as possible—at the expense of navigability, leakage-resilience, and all sorts of other criteria—so why not take advantage of it?\u00a0 Plus, that way I’ll be able to crack a joke about how Stata actually looks<\/em> like<\/em> it was created by that favorite creationist strawman, a tornado passing through a junkyard.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, all the stuff with me drawing complexity class inclusion diagrams on the whiteboard, reading my and Alex Arkhipov’s linear-optics paper<\/a>, walking around outside with an umbrella, lifting the umbrella to face the camera dramatically—that was all just the crew telling me what to do.\u00a0 (Well, OK, they didn’t tell me what<\/em> to write on the whiteboard or view on my computer, just that it should be something sciencey.\u00a0 And the umbrella thing wasn’t planned: it really just happened to be raining that day.)<\/p>\n

Q: Don’t you realize that not a word of what you said was new—indeed, that all you did was to translate the logic of natural selection, which Darwin understood in 1859, into algorithms and complexity language?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, of course, and I’m sorry if the show gave anyone the impression otherwise.\u00a0 I repeatedly begged them not to claim newness or originality for anything I was saying.\u00a0 On the other hand, one shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that what’s obvious to nerds who read science blogs is obvious to everyone else: I know for a fact that it isn’t.<\/p>\n

Q: Don’t you understand that you can’t “prove” mathematically that evolution by natural selection is really what happened in Nature?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course!\u00a0 You can’t even prove mathematically that bears crap in the woods (unless crapping in the woods were taken as part of the definition<\/em> of bears).\u00a0 To the writers’ credit, they did have Morgan Freeman explain that I wasn’t claiming to have “proved” evolution.\u00a0 Personally, I wish Freeman had gone even further—to say that, at present, we don’t even have mathematical theories that would explain from first principles why 4 billion years is a “reasonable” amount of time for natural selection to have gotten from the primordial soup to humans and other complex life, whereas (say) 40 million years is not<\/em> a reasonable amount.\u00a0 One could imagine<\/em> such theories, but we don’t really have any.\u00a0 What we do have is (a) the observed fact that evolution did<\/em> happen in 4 billion years, and (b) the theory of natural selection, which explains in great detail why one’s initial intuition—that such evolution can’t possibly<\/em> have happened by “blind, chance natural processes” alone—is devoid of force.<\/p>\n

Q: Watching yourself presented in such a goony way—scribbling Complicated Math Stuff on a whiteboard, turning dramatically toward the camera, etc. etc.—didn’t you feel silly?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of it\u00a0is<\/em> silly, no two ways about it!\u00a0 On the other hand, I feel satisfied that I got across at least one<\/em> correct and important scientific point to hundreds of thousands of people.\u00a0 And that, one might argue, is sufficiently worthwhile that it should outweigh any embarrassment about how goofy I look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update (Sept. 3): When I said that “about 5000 steps” are needed for the evolutionary approach to color an 8×8 chessboard, I was counting as a step any examination of two random adjacent squares—regardless of whether or not you end up having to change one of the colors.\u00a0 If you count only the changes, then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-announcements","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3016,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions\/3016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}