Exploring Basic Communication
This post is about getting a sense of the value of communication. I am not talking about verbal communication. Lets put that aside and get more basic then that. I found two situations that contrast with each other and highlight basic communication.
Lets look at exibit 1-A: Conjoined twins. Particularly the ones that share a body but maintain two separate healthy heads. These people have to deal with a situation. Each head controls one half of the body and they have to coordinate with each other to get everyday tasks done. It turns out they do them very well. They can get dressed, walk, drive and hold jobs just like everyone else. I say they are able to do this because they have excellent communication with each other.
Lets look at exibit 1-B: People who have undergone corpus callostomy. It turns out that a cure to severe epilepsy is to separate the two brain hemispheres. The bridge between the two brain hemispheres is the corpus collosum and what they do is cut thru it. The outcome of this procedure are failures in communication between the left side of your body and the right side. You fight with yourself when getting dressed. You find it difficult to accomplish complex tasks.
As you can see by comparing and contrasting these two situations you can see the value of basic communication. How can two independent thinking heads be better at coordination then one head with independent brain hemispheres? Well the conjoined twins learned to communicate where as people who had corpus callostomy lost valuable inner communication.
How is this important to computer science? Well I see it as a key to the future. The dream.
Lets look at slide 2: Hollywood and its fancy portrayal of interacting with computers. That is the dream. To be able to interact with the computer sooo seamlessly. I believe the key to getting there lies in communication. We need to learn to communicate with computers the same way conjoined twins communicate with each other.
Lets look at slide 3: The self checkout station. This is an example of what we have already achieved. Man and machine dance together at the self checkout station. Its a little overly romantic to use the word dance but you get the picture. You take an item, you show it to the scanner, if it beeps you put it in a bag, repeat. If it doesn’t beep, you scratch your head and try too find out the failure of communication.
Lets look at slide 4: Video Games and GamePads. I call this advance form of communication. You are able to do so much in videogames by just using a gamepad. I will dare to day this pressing of the buttons is a language. Not a programming language but a language none the less. Its a simple language we use to interact with the game. This situation deserves serious study because there are building blocks here. When we get to the iron man 2 computer we will have replaced buttons with gestures and the touchpad with eye tracking. We need to study what does it take for the computer to understand what we want? What are the limitations when we apply what we learn from this into other applications? What does it take to overcome those limitations?
