IlliGAL Blogging

I noticed an interesting post at viralexpansion about the value of studying different disciplines:

My thesis advisor and I were talking today. She commented that sometimes students ask "Why should we study other sciences? Why can't we just study computer science?" Her response is that the more knowledge that you amass, the more likely you are to be able to advance your own field.

Think about it. Most of the major advances in any science has been from the application of models and concepts of one field to another. Take biology for example - apply some basic biological concepts to computer science; what you get are things ike "DNA Computing" and "Genetic Algorithms". Take physics and materials science - apply some basic physical characteristics of materials, apply some electromagnetic physics, and you get things like the transistor. Take that one step further and apply logic, and you get the integrated circuit.

Indeed, and Arthur Koestler in the Act of Creation coined a nice term for this kind of creativity. He called it bisociation. Genetic algorithmists will recognize bisociation as a kind of cross-disciplinary crossover, and part of the surprise in the research leading up to the publication of The Design of Innovation was realizing how fast such processing could be. Where some still think of recombinative innovation as being slow, the math shows that discovery times grow only linearly or quadratically (depending upon the problem scaling) as the number of problem attributes increases. This speed contrasts sharply with the oft heard comment that GAs are slow. Yes, badly designed GAs are slow in hard problems (see Dirk Thierens's work in the mid 90s), but when you use next-generation GAs with adequate codings, watch out. Be prepared for surprisingly good answers quickly and reliably.