Donald Knuth argues that about 2% of people are true geeks, defined by two traits: jumping between levels of abstraction and comfort with case-based rules. He calls Alan Turing the first 100% geek because Turing designed machines, wrote manuals, invented subroutines, and even wrote numbers in reversed order to suit computers.
So you refer to people, including yourself, who gravitate toward a kind of computational thinking as geeks. At least I've heard you use that terminology.
It's true that I think there's something that happened to me as I was growing up that made my brain structured in a certain way that resonates with computers.
So there's the space of people, structural, 2% of the population you empirically estimate.
That's a fair, that's been proven fairly constant over most of my career. However, it might be different now because kids have different experiences when they're young.
So what does the world look like to a geek? What is, what is this aspect of thinking that is unique to.
That makes, yeah, that makes a geek. This is hugely important question. In, in the 50s, IBM noticed that, that there were geeks and non geeks and so they tried to hire geeks and they, and they put out ads with paper saying, you know, if you play chess, come to Madison Avenue and for an interview or something like this. You know, they were, they were trying for some things. So what, what is it that I find easy and other people tend to find harder? And I think there's two main things. One is ability to jump levels of abstraction. So you see something in the large and you see something in the small and you pass between those unconsciously. So you know that in order to solve some big problems, what you need to do is add one to a certain register and that gets you to another step and below the. Yeah, I don't go down to the electron level, but I knew what those milliseconds were, what the drum was like on the 650. I knew how I was going to factor a number or find a root of an equation or something because of what was doing. And as I'm debugging, I'm going through, did I make a key punch error? Did I write the wrong instruction? Do I have the wrong thing in a register? And each level is different. And this idea of being able to see something at lots of levels and fluently go between them seems to me to be more pronounced, much more pronounced in the, in the people that resonate with computers, like, well, stuff with high level. And this means that some people think, you know, that I should write better books. And it's probably true. But other people say, well, but that's. If you think like that, then that's the way to train yourself. Keep mixing the levels and learn more and more how to jump between. So that's the one thing. The other thing is that it's more of a talent to be able to deal with non uniformity where there's case one, case two, case three, instead of, instead of having one or two rules that govern everything. So it doesn't bother me if I need like an algorithm has 10 steps to it. You know, each step does something else that doesn't bother me. But a lot of pure mathematics is based on one or two rules which are universal. And, and, and so this means that people like me sometimes work with systems that are more complicated than necessary because it doesn't bother us that we don't, that we didn't figure out the simple rule.
And you mentioned that while Jacoby Boole abo all the mathematicians in the 19th century may have had symptoms of geek, the first 100% legit geek was touring Alan Turing.
I, I think he had, yeah, a lot more of the, of this quality than anybody just from reading the, the kind of stuff he did.
And so how does touring, what influence has Turing had on you?
Well, so I didn't know that aspect of him until after I graduated some years. I, it, as undergraduate we had a, a class that talked about computability theory and Turing machines and, and it was all, it sounded like a very specific kind of purely theoretical approach to stuff. So when, how old were they? When I, when I learned that he, that he had, you know, a design machine and that he wrote the, you know, he wrote a wonderful manual for, for Manchester machines and, and he invented all, you know, subroutines and, and, and he was a real hacker that, that he got his hands dirty. I, I, I thought for many years that he had only done purely formal work. As I started reading his own publications, I could, you know, you know, I could feel this kinship. And of course he had a lot of peculiarities. Like he wrote numbers backwards because, I mean left to right instead of right to left because it was easier for computers to process them that way.
What do you mean left to right?
He would write PI as, you know, 951-4.3. I mean, okay.
Right, got it.
4.1.3 on the blackboard. I mean when he, he, he had trained himself to, to do that because the computers he was working with worked.
That way inside, trained himself to think like a computer. Well, there you go. That's, that's geek thinking.
