The Agents of Entropy
A friend of mine, Charlie Campbell, also an architect, once defined architecture as "the science of lining things up." I would modify that to be "the art and science of lining things up," but that's nit-picky; otherwise, I think that's a great definition for my life's work.
I've liked lining things up since I was a little kid. By color, by size, by coolness, by age, whatever criterion that was suitable (or merely interesting) would do to justify my spending hours sorting and re-sorting piles of blocks, pebbles, leaves, toys, clothes, whatever. Even today, at sixty-three, my closet is sorted by color (blue t-shirts with blue dress shirts with blue pants, etc.) and our DVDs are sorted alphabetically. Why? It's not really a compulsion (I'm quite happy living in a level of disorder that drives my wife crazy), but the act of sorting gives me pleasure.
For that reason, in part, I've always known I would be an architect. I flirted with being an engineer, but I think I was pulled to architecture by the subtleties of curves, harmonic distributions, and sorting criteria such as color and aesthetic impact that make architecture maybe more of an art than is engineering.
I absolutely love the appearance on a site plan of artfully rhythmed contour lines, and I am always pleased to see how appealing the results are to those who live and work in my projects. But it isn't really the results that charm me, it is the process of ordering itself; there is something sensuous to me about taking a dis-ordered group of objects and exposing its inner order.
Luckily.
In my current role as "the Pum," or grandfather of my daughter's sons Ben and Theo, I try to hold the line against entropy. The boys, like most children of their ages (5½ and 2½, respectively), are the Agents of Entropy. And energetic and skilled agents they are.
I love to put my Dad's old stone building blocks into their bedraggled old wooden box; the boys delight in dumping them out. I enjoy stacking their alphabet blocks into ever-taller and more elaborate earthquake-proof towers; the boys love to become "Ben-zilla" or "Theo-zilla" and ravage my creations as part of their ferocious attacks on downtown Tokyo. I love putting their large collection of Hot Wheels in a parking lot sorted by color, size, and horsepower; Theo especially loves restoring their natural disorder rather explosively.
All to the good. I'm never upset (well, rarely upset ... sometimes the explosion of entropy is a little over the top), as each episode gives me another chance to put the toys in order again, using some new criterion maybe more zilla-resistant. (Not likely!) The resulting cycle of aesthetic order and exuberant disorder provides us with hours of mutual play time.
I'm wading through a book on my Kindle right now called "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's not about fetching young ballerinas in lesbian trysts, as you might imagine. The book's subtitle is "The Impact of the Highly Improbable," and refers to our societal blindness to the frequency and power of what he calls "black swans," sudden, unexpected, and profoundly disruptive events such as financial disasters, earthquakes, breakthrough technologies, and so-on.
It's a topic I've read about before, and relates to the issue of order and disorder and their relationship to chance, and our understanding of such things through the application of probability, which is, to put it kindly, limited and/or incorrect.
In any case, I return as I read to the idea that natural processes (in our corner of this universe, anyway), trend always toward entropy, or disorder. So pervasive is this tendency that entropy is called "the arrow of time", meaning that with the passage of time, things must, by the laws of physics, get more entropic, which is to say, messier. Conversely, noticing the order of events which results in greater disorder is an indicator of the direction of elapsing time, should that be in doubt.
Now, clearly, the acts of living things, including people, often lead to a seeming decrease in entropy rather than an increase. I.e., one of the things that distinguishes life from inanimate objects is their creation of order. This is particularly true of humans, and among humans, of architects and their ilk.
This has been studied at length, and it has been proven conclusively that neither people nor amoebas have the power to overcome the natural laws; our seeming creation of order in what we do is always local to us, and at the expense of increasing the overall level of disorder which surrounds us, thus resulting in a net increase in entropy in the universe, in exchange for a net decrease close to ourselves.
Nevertheless, there is something profoundly pleasing about bringing about order in the midst of chaos. Even knowing that overall my use of energy, resources, time and life force produces a net amount of disorder, the creation of a little island of order, pattern, rhythm, peace, and comprehensibility is worth the price to me. It seems such a human thing to do. In its humble way, it seems almost God-like to be able to wrest a coherent thing from out of the surrounding randomness.
Today, it occurred to me for the first time that our computers, although mighty agents of order, indeed, perform this task in an essentially different way from that in which mankind creates order.
Whether stacking blocks into a play skyscraper or alphabetizing a drawer of index cards, the human way is to physically sort them, i.e. to gather them together then replace them according to some sorting criteria ... alphabet, size, color, etc. as I've mentioned.
But the computer, god bless its overheated little silicon heart, doesn't (necessarily) do it this way.
A computer program simply inventories the set of objects to be ordered in place, then sorts the "mental" model of the set along with an index of where the sorted set of objects actually resides. In other words, it's as if you took a picture of the jumble of scattered blocks on the floor after a "Ben-zilla" attack, labeled each block in the photo with some unique tag which recorded its location and sorting characteristic (i.e., what letter of the alphabet is on it), sorted the tags accordingly, and printed out a database with the tags in order, and each one linked to one block, to be located as tagged in the photo.
The computer doesn't bother to actually move the blocks themselves into the desired order. It just tells you which blocks now lying there on the floor in a pile would be where if it did sort them. A machine (or a librarian, or a store clerk, or a data miner) can thus quickly retrieve any desired block by using this sorted list, just as if the blocks (books, shirts, facts) themselves had been physically moved around. This is especially helpful when different users or users at different times might want to find the largest shirt, or maybe the greenest one, or perhaps the cheapest one. The number of criteria by which the same set can be ordered is theoretically limitless, while the number of ways a set may be physically ordered (the number of sorting criteria available at once) is generally limited to the number of dimensions available. typically three.
So the question is, if the computer aids the counter-entropic efforts of its human operator by sorting chaotic sets for him, but if the set is not in fact re-ordered but merely indexed, is entropy decreased (even locally) in the same manner and or to the same degree as it would have been by a physical sort? Is the resulting net entropy increase in the universe at large greater or less than if the set had been physically ordered by hand?
These are the things I worry about while I wash and stack the dishes.
posted by Mique @ 3:09 PM
0 comments
