It's All About The Clouds

When I was a child, I would stare at the sky, dreaming of dinosaurs and dragons as the clouds put on a show for me. When I was older, clouds provided relief from the burning sun as I walked home, eyes still gazing at the sky. When my family and I would try to glimpse at the vast, starry sky through our Orion telescope, the clouds would enviously grab our attention, as Murphy’s law would have it. 

Today, however, I imagine those clouds in my mind. I find my brain in a confused state, swinging like a pendulum between being awestruck and overwhelmed. As my brain battles with itself, the right hemisphere fighting to see the big picture, the left hemisphere stubbornly examining the pieces, I keep switching between the two sides. When I see the “big picture” (I see conflicting pictures), the one below is included.

Terms flying around, a wealth of concepts and topics to explore. I see the big picture - sometimes I see it as how amazing it is that I am falling into a place I will never get bored in. There’s something to learn every step of the way, a challenge to overcome, another vast ocean filled with opportunities to discover. The same picture, at other times, tears me apart as I have to choose between each ocean, and quite honestly - I have no idea where or how to begin. The wonderful thing about today, the internet and resources are that there are an endless amount of starting points, each resource more comprehensive than the next. Online courses, tutorials, walk-throughs, labs, examples, quickstarts, books, articles, lectures, the list goes on. The irony is it can be too much sometimes - where do I begin?

The issue goes much further than vocabulary and jargon. This week, especially, it struck me how vast artificial intelligence is in terms of its applications. How does anyone know that they want to work on a particular challenge? How do they know they have found the "just-right" one (it was too easy for Goldilocks)? Machine learning could be used for addressing social causes, in the commercial world, with medicine and pharmaceuticals, the future of human-computer interaction, robotics, education. Our limitless creativity is the limit to its applicabilities, perhaps. 

On the flip side, my left hemisphere takes control and leaves me fascinated at each detail. Maybe I start with a tensorflow tutorial, and I want to know how forward and backward propagation works, or how to choose the right activation functions, or how many neurons each layer should have, or… it’s a blackbox. Each question takes me deeper, but to the point where it feels frustrating. 

When I program at coding contests, I am aware that my code is a messy tangle of statements and a haphazardly put together collage, random lines of code trying to make quick fixes to solve bugs. I also am aware that in an ideal world, code written like that would be deemed ugly, horrendous, and it would be the time-to-restart - and for good reason. There is no way anyone can be expected to read and understand code written like that. The coding contests I have attended are acutely focused on the present moment, not for the future. Therefore, the primary goal is for the program to run with no issues and to simply pass the test cases. In other words - it just needs to work.

Similarly, in a world that is so result oriented, sometimes, I believe that a tangible outcome helps to stay motivated. Likewise, being a beginner means that I just want it to work, leading me to ask questions, and go after understanding exactly what is happening. Tackling each challenge one at a time, and not trying to simultaneously do everything, should become my strategy. Striking that balance between trying to achieve breadth in the field, but at the same time trying to stay focused and attempting to understand each concept more deeply, is my goal.

This week definitely was cloudy (meteorologically). It was filled with exploratory clouds - floating around new concepts that are undeniably challenging. Each obstacle inspires me to be honest with myself and to tell myself, “no, I did not understand” and reread, or rewatch, or relearn - again, and again, and again. I suppose it takes effort to make it seem effortless.