Genetic Inference

With apologies to The Cosmic Web.

Today I came across this image, burried deep in the windows on my computer desktop:

This picture popped up almost entirely by accident, when I was attempting to do something else - it is just a series of random numbers, picked from the normal distribution, connected together with very thin lines. The grey shading you see is because most numbers tend to fall in the middle, with less moving out to the edge - lots of very thin lines merge together to make a darker grey. To me, it looks like an ink sketch of a section of waterfall, or perhaps a city-scape seen through a rain-drenched window.

We are always used to seeing scenes of nature that suddenly strike us as beautiful, and to me this looks like the same class of thing. While it came from a computer, it is a naturally occurring pattern, that was generated without being asked for, for no purpose. It does not look pretty because it was designed to do so; like a sunset, I find it beautiful, but it does not belong to me, it was not placed there for me. I just happened to be there.

I should probably have put a Sentimentality Warning at the start of this post…

There has been a lively discussion on the Sanger’s internal e-mail list, inspired by this extract from Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired. The take-home message of the extract is that companies and institutions are stuck in a 20th Century way of thinking about computing resources: we plan for scarcity, assume that memory or CPU time are limited, and get people to keep to strict rules to keep usage down. But these days, computing is cheep; what is scarce is human time, ingenuity, and exploration, and heavily restricting computing use wastes and stifles these things.

This specific issue raised is that the Sanger’s computing maintainers often e-mail us to tell us that our shared hard drives are getting full, and we each need to clear out a few gigs. Someone pointed out that it takes a good half an hour to cut back space, translating to a few dozen person hours across the Institute, and the end result, a few hundred gigs of space, could be purchased from amazon for 50 quid or less. This, the argument goes, gets the cost-benefit analyses the wrong way around; 20 person hours is worth so much more than 200Gb of disk space.

The reply, and resulting discussion, hammered out something that I could call a consensus ensemble of computing resource philosophies, if I wasn’t worried about alienating everyone I’ve ever loved.
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