IlliGAL Blogging

I met a young man today who told me a story about a professor at a major US university. The faculty member, trained in traditional operations research (OR), opened his class on optimization with the phrase, "Burn genetic algorithms." What an open-minded sentiment. The enlightened gentleman went on to argue that most problems of interest could be solved by assuming convexity. When one has a hammer, everything DOES look like a nail, but tackling only the problems we can provably solve seems remarkably uninventive, especially coming from a professor of technology in this most inventive of eras.

After all, we don't place the same burden of proof on other inventions used in our everday lives. Has anyone proven that an airplane flies--that is, really proven flight in a sense that would satisfy the spherical gentleman in his convex world? Has anyone proven that an automobile is mobile? Has anyone proven that a toaster toasts bread? Indeed, we do understand the principles of flight, the physics of internal combustion, the science of electricity and heating, and it is important to understand physics and principles in any design task, but proofs of convergence elude us in even fairly simple material machines; we don't even think it very worthwhile an endeavor to pursue such proofs. Why then do we demand so much more from conceptual machines such as optimization procedures, computer codes, and genetic algorithms?

One answer is that we are trapped in Descartes's mind-body dichotomy, treating conceptual objects differently and separately from their material counterparts. If this is the problem, why don't we just stop ourselves before we kill again. Design is design is design, whether it is performed on material or conceptual objects (repeat this six times before bed time).

Another answer is that we are all merely prisoners of the cultural conventions of our training, trapped, like the GA-burning OR professor living in his convex world, by the norms of our narrow fields. To combat this kind of narrowmindedness requires us all to remember that there are usually interesting nuggets of knowledge in every discipline, even those we don't full grasp or understand, but to suggest that any discipline should be "burned" is a kind of intellectual fascism that has no place in a school of any kind, let alone a major research university.