Fun of Emergence, and ``Fun'' of IE11

Deterministic

[Statistics] of or relating to a process or model in which the output is determined solely by the input and initial conditions, thereby always reutrning the same results (opposed to stochastic).

Stochastic

[Statistics] of or relating to a process involving a randomly determined sequence of observations each of which is considered as a sample of one element from a probability distribution.

Emergence

When an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emeerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.

Why these literal dictionary definitions?

Because I think I am seeing why people do the things they do, and like the things they like, and more importantly, dislike the things they do not like. It is not a philosophical triumph by any regard, but a personal epiphany.

Generally, we think that determinism is a great thing---know the initial conditions, know the rules, and the outcome is perfectly predictable. That's the guiding philosophy for early natural philosophy, which explains the formulation of the so-called classical laws [of Physics/Chemistry] and the development of axiomatic Mathematics.

Then we realise that not everything is deterministic in nature, but there exists some good statistical bulk behaviour that can be characterised by stochastic processes, where the outcome of any individual member is not known, but the overall ``average'' behaviour of the system can be characterised by some probability distribution and set of rules. This, of course, leads to the theories of temperature, deeper quantum-related explanations of particle/wave behaviour, probability/statistics, and of course, the fabled statistical machine learning/data mining.

Despite the power that stochastic reasoning has, there is still the problem of the time horizon, where the predictive power of the stochastic reasoning gets increasingly unreliable the longer the time horizon we look at. That is because of emergence, or how the interactions of the parts that comprise the system introduce an exponential increase in the state space to the point that we currently do not have any good language to describe them. This is why the less bio-chemistry forms of biology, psychology, sociology, and even economics remain mostly intractable. A possible issue is that our language is very sequence heavy while such emergent-behaviour centric systems necessitate a certain level of parallelism and concurrent interaction that we have no way of characterising with our current reasoning machinery.

I hypothesise that if we become good at understanding emergence, then we are one step closer to claiming powers that only the gods themselves are said to wield. But I doubt that emergence is the final frontier for knowledge---it is likely that there is some even larger and more complex mechanism that is outside of our ken. I think that... supremum method is likely to be the minimal level of a technical description of God that one can muster, if one truly dares to step that far.

But let's bring everything back to the current reality and put things into perspective.

For most people, whether they are willing to admit it out loud or not, a life that is couched in determinism is boring. There is no fun in doing something whose outcome is already known before one has done it. This explains a lot of the push of automating so-called low value menial work (highly repetitive and simple actions in a controlled environment), and the slow movement towards automating the soon-to-be-called low value forms of intellectual work (highly repetitive and simple actions in a controlled environment). This is also why jobs that are effectively determinism in nature are paid lowly---there is little to no un-understandable risks involved.

Life that is in a stochastic setting is a bit more exciting than determinism, but can be boring for those who can calculate. Quality control processes come to mind, as do gambling in the form of a lottery, or any other games of chance at the casino. To those who don't know the underlying stochastic process (and bounding distributions) well, stochastic processes are always exciting, and their ignorance often causes them to be potentially taken advantage of by someone who has the appropriate knowledge and wherewithal to exploit it. So insurance companies, armed with reams of actuarial data, as well as casinos, armed with complete analysis of the expected values from the games of chance they offer, have a field day plying their trade to the ignorant.

Life in emergence, that's the true and real life. There are many rules that guide our behaviour in society (for different subsets of society), but there are even more interactions and multi-level relationships among the people. As a result, nothing is truly predictable with high confidence as the time horizon increases. War is a brutal example---the different sides in a conflict have their material, their manpower, their training. Often there is some strategic and tactical analysis to estimate the chances of success for a particular war plan. But nothing is really predictable in the deterministic nor the stochastic way, and the only way to find out if one is successful is to actually fight the war.

A less gruesome version of that is that of team sports. I had been wondering for many years why people were so into team sports like football, rugby, American football, baseball and the like. Or why someone would want to grow potted plants, or rear fish in an aquarium. None of these things seem to be ``useful''.

And then I examined myself in terms of watching speedruns. Why do I enjoy watching speedrun videos? Or why do I find those recent YouTube videos that I was talking about over my many posts interesting?

The answer surprised me. Because in all these cases, we are drawn to emergence. Yes, there are fixed rules (game rules for sports, the programming and hardware for the video game being speedrun, laws of Physics for the building videos, social rules for those that involve interaction). But despite these fixed rules, none of the fun stuff that occurs could have been predicted, and that's what make things fun. Because good surprises are fun, and the definition of a surprise is something that was unexpected (good just means that there isn't any danger real or perceived).

In short, the me who likes watching speedrun videos and/or Let's Play/live-stream videos is no different from the football fanatic. We are all junkies for the unexpected that happens from emergence---our only difference is the choice of the system that we want to observe.

It's the same for the potted plant grower and aquarium afficionado as well---they are managing some systems and derive part of their fun from observing emergence, looking for surprises that pique their interest.

I think it's also the same reason why people go on hikes, or develop wanderlust. It's the idea of seeing something unexpected [in a safe way] that provides a type of recreation which makes life less scary than the steady march to death.

Actually, it's also the same reason why people are drawn to religion. The scripture and doctrine are fixed rules, but their application and applicability to one's life is the identification of which rules needed to be applied for a specific [personal] observation of an emergent behaviour.

I never thought that emergence could be a contender for a super-set interpretation over stochastic, my previous favourite paradigm of viewing the world. I think I might want to ponder on this more.

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In other news, I rearranged my room a little today. One problem I was facing was that I wasn't playing any instrument as often as I should, of which part of the reason was the severe blocking of access to my sheet music due to the original arrangement. In my previous arrangement, the music stands needed to have the two tenor saxophones and a few other instrument stands moved out of the way first before accessing the stands. That was non-trivial because I had to move the obstructions somewhere to retrieve said stands, and then move them out of the way again to have place to play whatever instruments I wanted.

All that contributed to inertia.

So I switched things around, arranging my instrument cases that don't sit on my 笛子 shelf so that they line the space in an `L' configuration, and have the main music stand sit immediately behind me, where I used to squirrel away one soprano saxophone, one alto saxophone, and one bass flute. The rest of the instrument stands now sit in front of the instrument cases that are in the `L' configuration. I think this reduces the inertia, and it is a good thing because I want to start doing more hard stuff for 笛子 and flute again soon.

After doing more stupid tweaks at stupid o'clock, I finally had a chance to test out the updated fonts (and their TrueType fallbacks) on Eirian-IV. It crashed the experimental browser. After some very lazy investigation, it turns out that the experimental browser did download the TrueType fallback fonts, but had trouble rendering the page using them, possibly due to the memory limitations of the device and/or operating system.

On a whim, I tried it on IE11, and promptly regretted it. The bloody thing does not handle any of the special whitespace characters that I use to adjust the formatting---everything gets turned into some oversized quad-space monstrosity. Oh, thank goodness for the TrueType fallback fonts---IE11 does not understand WOFF2. So viewing this blog in IE11 will use the dreaded `Il1|' nonsense that Arial provides (it's not worth it to embed the Base64 encoded version of the TrueType fonts due to the size and the number of browsers that actually need it).

Well, that's IE11 for you. 🤦‍♂️

I fixed the prettyprinter to not use such characters if it detects that it is running in IE11, and that's about it. There are also problems with the way the fuzzified update times are failing on IE11 on the time-out based auto-update, but I'm less concerned about it because even without the auto-update, the demonstrated contents on the first load is still technically correct.

The more astute should suddenly ask this question: ``Why the heck are you dealing with IE11? Isn't it supposed to go the way of the dodo thanks to the existence of Edge?''

If one reads the IE11 Wikipedia article, one should realise that there doesn't seem to be an end-date for IE11's support in Windows 10. Also, I made the mistake of testing my personal domain on IE11, and since it looked much fuglier than I could stand, I just felt this compulsion to fix it.

Oh, and IE11 doesn't handle the reversed ordered lists at all, so it's like I went back to the stone ages, to the time before I updated the entire site to use HTML5.

As for the reading, I've completed page 743/1321 for Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, and Animorphs Series: The Capture.

I think I'm going to head out to my favourite bar to do more reading, beer, and burgers tomorrow.

Till the next update.

(And this time, for God's sake, I should sleep waaaaaaaaaaay before stupid o'clock. Having only about 4 hours of sleep on a sabbatical is downright stupid, not to mention a great way of setting myself up for falling sick in a time period where any form of fever-related illness is looked at with great suspicion of being a case of the COVID-19.)