Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Dual Noise

An underlying intent of this tab is to explore duality. A belief that there is a counter-balance to everything, that there are always two sides to a coin. neither of which is fully clear unless you understand the other. In other words, the truth is "not this alone". We speak and somebody listens, We write and somebody reads. Cause and Effect, Yin and Yang, What goes around .... If we pay careful attention, the more we learn about the first one ("the primal"), we get to know a lot about the other one ("the dual"). In fact, Modern O.R theory and practice is founded on the concepts of mathematical duality. In Hindu Philosophy, duality (and non-duality) are fundamental recurring themes (Dvaita, Advaita).

In virtually every instance, what we write about or speak of is only an approximation of our intent, and what we read and hear is a further approximation of that primal intent. Crime and Punishment are rarely commensurate. In other words, while duality is a powerful property that helps us get closer to the ultimate truth, it is riddled with a lot of noise that is 'lost in translation' that considerably confuses the issue. Mathematically, dual noise is a phenomenon observed in Operations research where sometimes, your raw dual information does not guarantee a better understanding of the primal problem. One reason for this is degeneracy (multiplicity). A seemingly endless number of paths that have to be explored to discover the truth. This is yet another OR theme that always shows up in practice. There seem to be many truths! Which of these truths is the 'best' truth?

So this tab, when tired of tooling, will try to explore various events in real life through the prism of duality, and try to characterize it using some of the concepts described above. It's a lofty yet unclear goal that's set up to fail, but for every primal failure, there's got to be dual success, right?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.