Probably Approximately Correct

If god appears before me and says, “the world is going to end, only you and someone else of your choice will be spared”. At the first look, I do not if it is a boon or a bane! But, If I am forced to make a choice; I have no doubts in my mind - who my first choice will be. Rather, it will be my first 100 choices and the second distinct choice will surely come in at a lowly 101th position.

Looking back at my life over the past 23 odd years. I have no doubt to say that the last 6 have been most influential. I would also say they have been the most entertaining. The first 17-18 years were monotonous and the Prasant that existed for the first three-quarters was (I can dare to say) boring and liked to keep himself away from most of the things.

For most of my childhood, I only had myself to look at. I was at school inside NSTL (a research organization) and my schedule was that of a typical child - My dad used to drop me in school by 8:30 and at a school, we know it does not take a lot to spend/while away time! I used to hang around in the school till 5:00 and that was the time when my dad would come and pick me up :-) There were about 4-5 hours to spend at home and the usual stuff filled up my time - playing video games, may be a movie and any sport that was telecasted. For some reason, the life at school and at home were completely independent. I would say the co-relation between the two worlds was zero! May be even negative!

And then came the moment, after an average performance in the class X exams. My Dad decided to keep me away from the usual stress of an engineering exam and I would say, risked me and sent me off to a place named Puttaparti, on the banks of river chitravati. It was school which promises all round development of the child by making him a part of various extra-curricular activities like usually sports, games and also singing :P Not that I had a voice after I left that place - at least I learnt some carols, Islamic verses and some vedic chants — It was a truly secular experience in that sense :-)

It was a weird place in the sense that it was highly structured and disciplined — The schedule starts at 5:00 am in the morning with a small prayer and a routine drill of physical training for about an hour. The Classes start at 8:30 am and used to go on till 3:00pm. And then another set of physical activities ensured that the evening was busy. The only time we were asked to study was from 7:30pm to 9:30 - and the day ends there. There were no exceptions - you are forced into bed by 9:30. In a way, it was good - it ensured a good healthy schedule and brought some orderliness into my life. As always with any other scheme - the good is always accompanied by the bad. That was no exception to me as well - the bad part happened to be the fact that I was forced into a shell and to gain control over emotions and to gather strength to overcome the hostile atmosphere - I literally shut down myself. I sort of made survival my only goal. Sometimes, you see the only goals you can set yourself are just survival and you tend to protect your natural self. My natural self since early days in life has been being lazy - at everything, always postpone things to the last second. I was so lazy that I never cared to read the usual child’s favourite stuff like may be Hardy boys or the card games or any other hobby which say requires minimal physical effort. All I had done was to watch tv - an effortless activity :-)

So, by the end of my stay - I came out as a stubborn, aggressive individual who had no idea what was the world outside! I was so dumb. All I realized that I was really low on confidence, general information which people had. I should say I was slightly skewed in terms of the cultures. I had no idea about the franca Lingua (common language/traits to convey emotions and feelings). I never understood what can be told or what cannot be. I was sort of fighting a lone battle. By the time, I finished my studies over there - I lost all my contacts of school friends. Oh, I did not tell you that in the school at puttaparti - There was a literally no contact with outside world! In those days, e-mails or cell phones were not at a rage. You were only only allowed to write a letter and I knew that people/students outside had very little chance to write a letter - they hardly have any time to finish up their curriculum. So, at the end of my secondary school (class 12), I was only looking at myself and literally none. All I knew was my Dad and mom. It was really a low moment for me. I spent entire summer writing some competitive exams and ofcourse my dad understood me and took good care of me. He realized I badly needed some exposure and some freedom to recover my good old free spirit. I managed to get the Last Rank in JEE Mains and a decent rank in the AIEEE exam. Would you believe that I refused to come to counselling and my dad literally dragged me in and you know what - he filled my options and I was literally standing at the exit of the room. My Dad was wise enough to organize my options and I made it into a little known Computer Science Institute.

It was in these circumstances, I entered into IIIT on July the 24th and what followed was chaotic for the first few months. In lieu of my stay at the earlier place, I was again aloof, stayed away from anything and everything. I used to sleep at 9:30 or 10:00 and wake up by 6:00 (beyond that I could not sleep :P). Probably, an outcome of following a well-drilled schedule for about 2 years.

I still remember the day - it was about a month into the college and I was into my cozy bed by 10:00pm. It was then a crazy guy comes to my room, bangs the door hard at around 12:00 in the midnight. It was the very first time I had seen him. He was probably running - I could see he was exhausted. He had an unusual charisma - not the usual thing I knew of. All all through my life (till then) - I saw different types of people. But, this guy was really disgusting. I hated to see him. He was clad in clothes which were like yaaak - you what I am saying - The dress was full of dirt, stink and a frame which was really unique. He was flat footed, chubby, a tinch of baldness (?) when you look at his hair. All this in the middle of sleep and He blabbered the following, “Praveen’s Birthday celebrations are on, everyone is there - only you are not around. I came to take you.” I put up an expression which probably made him feel - I wondering who Praveen was! He murmured back - “Praveen, Praveen; He is the guy who sits besides you in the class everyday!” I gave him back a serious look and told him - “I am off for the day and I am sleeping”. He tried to convince me by showcasing the drinks and the cakes/desserts on offer. Ruthlessly (I was!) I shut down the door on him. The door was closed with such venom that I am sure any mortal/sensible person who have hated me for more than a lifetime! I guessed that probably this was the last time - He would talk to me. Not that I cared for it. After mercilessly shutting the door on him - I happily slept through the night.

I had a nightmare when it comes to my classes in the first year. English class from Appanna was the most horrible and harassing class I have been to in my life. He was a piece of **** - believe me, he was literally. Physics and Maths were not any better as well - but the large size of class made me feel better. I was lucky in that I had the good company sudha, sana and siddhu for the classes and other non-academic stuff. I wonder will such moments will ever turn up again in my life - the total careless attitude and give a damn outside towards anything and everything in life. Only class, I cared about was C-Programming; well not really cared but managed to do the assignments in quick time and even helped guys around me.

The life back in the hostels was cool and had excellent company in the form of Raguram - this guy is a genius. He made me wonder for his amazing abilities. He was too good with math and physics - which are not baffling ofcourse. But, this fella’s drawings were really awesome and his imagination literally out of the world. And there was Jimmy - I should say he was lost in his own world :-)

Nearly a month and a half passed - there was no sign of this mysterious guy (who broke my sleep) around. I was pleased that I rarely saw him around and glad that I never met him :-) It was in one of the end semester exams of a course named Digital Logic Design (I suppose) - I came out of the exam hall and in my usual way trying to evade everyone else and take the longest route back to the room so that I can avoid as many guys/gals as possible! I felt someone trying to catch my shoulder and give a pat on my back. It was the dark skinned devil again - This time he comes up to me and says, “I screwed up the exam. I doubt I can get even a couple of problems correct. And then, he paused.” In my own style, “I gave him a look suggesting my intentions of giving a damn to him or his performance.” But then, not withstanding his natural instincts started asking me about my performance in the exam. I told him I had finished almost all the problems with the exception of possibly one and give a stare which meant - “Go and get along with work. Do not deal with me!” I did not turn back and went on with my journey back to my room. I hoped that I scared him enough that I will not see this guy for the rest of my college if not for life. The semester ended and I took a break, went home; refreshed myself and was back for the registration of my second term at college.

I was in the registration queue and I could sense something was not going well. And as it happens so many times, the devil enters; this time he was really funny - can clearly see that he has neither bathed not changed the overnight dress and came rushing to register in time straight from the bed. My feelings went from bad to worse and my bad - he came and stood right after me! That was a moment which I can never forget - I regretted being right next to him.

True to his natural instincts and as expected, this person (whom I had no idea of) out of the blue says, “This semester there is a course called Data Structures. It is really tough and it will be taught by a taskmaster. It will be great if we can pass it and get through to the next term.” Upon listening this, I went mad and told him on his face,“Stop this non-sense. Why are you talking to me. I do not know you. I do not know you name. What the heck is wrong with you? Why should I care for your opinions about a god forsaken course.” He smiled back to say,“Hehe… I am cautioning you so that are aware of this fact. But, it is tough and If you get an A I will give you a party at Paradise.” I confirmed to myself at that point that this guy is indeed mad. What is wrong with him - First of all, I ask to shut up and even after humiliating him so many times; he comes up to me and offers me a treat if I happen to crack a course! I said to myself that this guy is nuts and moved on. But, then on the way back to my room he persisted and gave me no option but to say, “Ok. Let us see!” The semester has just started and I was really hoping that I would not run into this creature once more.

But (un)fortunately, I could never keep this scum away from me for any significant length of time! But believe me, I tried to the best of my capacity to thwart him. I tried all sorts of things - things like trying to humiliate him at every opportunity, tried to hurt his confidence etc. etc. But, no matter I did — he always reappeared! Nothing seemed to be affecting him. Such was his shamelessness and also, my hatred towards him that - I never talked any good to him and always unkind and dismissive to any thing he says/offers.

To see how the semester unfolded and what ensured later - you have to wait till the next post :D

This is what the orientation camp at MIT seems to offer! There are several other exciting events like Prudential Skywalk and Icecream, Cambridge Pub Crawl, Hiking Trip to White Mountains. There is lot of partying in near future :-) The complete itinerary is given here.

I hope most of the you are aware that Nandan Nilekani is heading the Unique Identification Authority of India — which aims at giving an unique smart card to every Indian.  This is an fictitious read on Nandan’s intro to parliament (Hattip: Anuj Gupta).

How can Quantum physics aid Computing ?

It is widely believed that quantum computers cannot solve NP-Complete problems in Polynomial (.) time.

Quantum mechanics usually allows only linear transformations. In lay man terms, only those transformations which can be described by a matrix. Surprisingly, an arbitrary amount of non-linearity (say, non-zero quantity) will empower quantum computers to not only NP-Complete problems but also outside much harder ones.

Before, we go ahead and discuss on what can be the limits of efficient computation in this world and what can Quantum computers do ! We need to understand the limits of physics.

Physics has survived a long time without a unified theory. The reason is that, as far as experiment is concerned , we have been able to divide the world into two realms. In the atomic realm, quantum physics reigns, we can usually ignore gravity. We can treat space and time much as Newton did — as an unchanging background. The other realm is that of gravitation and cosmology. In that world, we can often ignore quantum phenomena.

But this cannot be anything other than a temporary, provisional solution. To go beyond, it is the first great unsolved problem in theoretical physics:

Combine general theory of relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of Quantum gravity.

Besides the argument based on unification, there are problems specific to each theory that call for unification with each other.

Each theory has a problem of infinities. In nature, we are yet to encounter anything measurable that has an infinite value. But in both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite.

General relativity has a problem with infinities because inside a black hole the density of matter and hence the strength of gravitational field quickly becomes infinite. That appears to have been the case very early in the history of the universe — at least, if we trust general relativity to its infancy. At the point at which the density becomes infinite, the equations of general relativity break down. Some people interpret this as time stopping, but a more sober view is that theory is just inadequate. For a long time, wise people have speculated that it is inadequate because the effects of quantum physics have been neglected.

The quantum theory, in turn, has its own trouble with infinities. They appear whenever you attempt to use quantum mechanics to describe fields, like the electromagnetic field. The problem is that the electric and magnetic fields have values at every point in space. This means that are an infinite number of variables. An infinite number of variables can lead to equations that get out of hand and predict infinite numbers when you ask questions about the probability of an event.

These are cases where we cannot help but feel that an essential part of physics has been left out. The problem of Quantum gravity is one of the 5 most fundamental problems in Physics.

PS: There are four more fundamental problems that ail current physics. They will be discussed in the subsequent  posts.

After watching yesterday’s T20 world cup match, I felt how can be this the best team that India can send to the world Cup?  Especially when you look at the following:

• Likes of  [Rohit + Raina + Yuvraj] leaking nearly 20-25 runs which in my  humble opinion was school boy stuff!
• Ishant and Zaheer sending down such toothless deliveries.
• Can someone remind Dhoni that four is not the maximum. You are allowed to hit a six in cricket!
• Were India safegaurding Yuvi by sending in Jadeja ahead? I never understood this logic of rescuing your best — when it should be the other way round!

For some weird reason, I loved watching IPL to World T20. IPL was a festive atmosphere. Lets move into other things.

400 years ago, the formal study of sciences began. In this post, we look at the tale of two problems -  One from physics and the other from Maths.  Both these problems have rich history.  They have been known to mankind since 4 centuries.

The first one being the famous Three body problem in physics and the second one being the Fermat’s Last Theorem. Informally, three-body problem is:

The problem is that of determining the motion of three bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation given their initial postions, masses and velocities.

This is the longest standing open problem in physics.

Moving on the second problem,  it was a problem introduced by Fermat in the year 1637. It remained open till recently and was solved in 1995 by Andrew Wiles. Informally, the problem is

Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two

An excellent book on the history of this problem is this book by Simon Singh. It offers wonderful insights into the efforts made by Andrew. It took him nearly 9 years of dedicated effort to solve this monster! He uses techniques from the theory of elliptic curves to arrive at a solution.

The first problem, however, remains an unsolved mystery! The contrast cannot get any bigger!