I think one characteristic that has defined many of my interests is my attraction to emergent beauty. Let me offer a few examples:
1. Music. This is probably one of the most universal interests, as I haven’t yet met anyone who doesn’t like music at all. However, music can have very different meanings for different people, hence the existence of so many genres. Personally, I love music because it all derives from this simple fact: sounds can be created at different pitches.
From this fact came the realization that some of these pitches sound good together---enter scales and chords. Then, someone realized certain chords could be combined to create packets of emotion, then these packets coalesced into cohesive pieces…and so humanity’s diverse discography, spanning every emotion, environment, and aesthetic, emerges from a singularly simple property of sound.
2. Puzzles. One of my favorite puzzles is Akari, a game which involves placing lights to satisfy certain requirements. It has only three rules:
- If a square is marked with a number, that many lights must be placed next to that square.
- No two lights can shine on one another.
- Every square must be lit.
Simple, right? However, in order to solve the more difficult puzzles, you need to recognize certain structures and how they constrain the lighting of one another. Thus, although there are only 3 baseline rules, new rules “emerge” from how the board itself is configured, and it becomes the solver’s task to recognize these new rules and use them to his advantage.
3. Theoretical CS. When I tell people I’m into CS, they often respond with, “oh, do you make games or websites?” I do, but what interests me most are algorithms: these are more abstract, but I like studying them because, like music and puzzles, they only rely on a simple set of rules about how fast certain computations (e.g. adding/subtracting, writing/reading memory) can be done. Contrast this with web or game development, which requires dozens of external libraries, each of which requires dozens more: these behemoth codebases may be powerful, but their bulk lacks the elegance carried by smaller, more streamlined algorithms.