Nonsense as an art form

Talking about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I just recall that Sumit Bhttacharya from work picked up an amazingly good deal for the book, hardbound. And at the same Strand book fair where I got my Minsky. He is reading it now.

A couple of days ago I am shooting the breeze with him: “Man! Isn’t the guy mad?! Adams is not even pretending to make sense. No attempt to make subtle metaphor. No nothing. The entire H2G2 thing is one roller-coaster ride into complete nonsense. And yet all of it eventually makes him a genius. And deservingly too!”

Sumit cuts the gushing: “Douglas Adams is to sci-fi what Frank Zappa is to music.”

Wow! That is it! Well put buddy!

Adams and Zappa must be some kind of cosmic brothers. Cool! Huh?

Is H2G2's Marvin actually MIT AI lab's Minsky?

On Monday morning, two books got me thinking. They were sitting cover by cover on the backseat.

To the left was the nerdy The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. And to the right was Douglas Adams’ freaky Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The legendry Minsky’s masterpiece was there because I had managed to get an improbable bargain for it at the Strand book fair. And it has been with me since. The Guide was travelling to spend some time with Krishna Kumar from work who has only read one of the four parts in the ‘trilogy’.

For Guide fans the most endearing character is, of course, Marvin, the paranoid android. Now I got wondering if Adams had named the android after AI guru Marvin Minsky.

Minsky is equally well known for his adventures with a robot at the MIT’s AI labs. Isn’t he?

As I was nearing office, I was getting really excited and completely convinced that this must be so. And I was kicking myself for how in all these years I never suspected it.

Then I asked the mother of all oracles: the Internet!

First I went straight off to the community site. And found nothing there.

Then I went the Guide’s home. Nothing there either.

And finally I went to the place where all finally go; to the place where we should have gone first and not finally: To the trusty Wikipedia. And there I found the answer…

1. It was not 42
2. There was a time when some nerd had claimed on Wikipedia that Marvin, the paranoid android, was indeed named after Minsky. But that is not true.
3. Wikipedia now has a correction which reads...
   …Marvin was *not* named after Marvin Minsky but was, according to Adams, originally named "Marshall" after a friend of his, name later arbitrarily changed to "Marvin" to protect his friend's identity and/or sound less like a cowboy…

What an anticlimax to an otherwise wonderful morning :-(

Analogy is the key

People take a shot of midday coffee. Ashok takes a puzzle.

A few days ago he called: “Zaki, if you are going to lock your documents in a box with a padlock and get a boy to take it to your lawyer, how will he open it if you never send the key?”

The answer is quite interesting...

1. The lawyer puts his own padlock on top of your padlock, retains his key, and sends the box back to you.
   
2. You now, use your key to unlock your original padlock and once again send the box back to the lawyer with his lock still on it.
   
3. This time the box has only the lawyer’s lock on it and the lawyer opens it with his own key.
   
4. No key was ever sent out by either the sender or the receiver. Nevertheless, the contents of the box were accessible to the sender.
   

Isn’t that beautiful?

Even better, this is the best ever analogy I have heard for explaining something called ‘asymmetric public key encryption’.

The Internet uses many additions to and variations of this basic solution when it securely carries your passwords and credit card numbers.

In the past, I have tried to explain public key encryption to numb executives but failed dramatically.

That was because instead of using such an analogy I jumped into “prime number theory” and dwelt extra time on “the assumed difficulty in arriving at the prime factors of a large number”. And of course, how all these prime number properties go into building public and private keys :-(

Now thanks to Ashok’s riddle I should be able to explain asymmetrical encryption in a snap. What a brilliant way to explain a brilliant idea.